


Mirror, rorriM

by William_Easley



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: College, F/M, Halloween, Horror, Mystery, Romance, Suspense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:22:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 41,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24127333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/William_Easley/pseuds/William_Easley
Summary: Wanda Bailey is a junior in college, too caught up with her duties and studies to be concerned with romance. Alex Pines is a freshman eager to study IT and surprised to run into a slightly older and unattached girl like Wanda. However, before he can hope to get closer to her, he'll have to help with a Halloween party that somehow leads to the kind of weird stuff that never happens in real life . . . until it does. A post-AU story, but in the same universe. Complete in 18 chapters
Relationships: Wanda Bailey/Alex Pines
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. College Rules

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or the characters of the show. These are the property of Alex Hirsch, the creator of the show, and the Walt Disney Company. I don't earn any money by writing these fanfictions, but just write for fun and practice and in the hope that others enjoy reading them.

* * *

**Mirror, rorriM**

**by William Easley**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**1: College Rules**

Dowling Hall had five floors and five Resident Assistants. Heather Fahlberg, who was a senior, was the Head R.A. and lived in the second-largest dorm room, adjoining the office on the first floor. Wanda Bailey, junior, was one of two new R.A.'s. Her domain was the third floor, nineteen rooms plus a study room. She lived in 301 and was responsible for thirty-six freshmen and sophomore girls. She wanted to succeed and expected she would. After all, Wanda was super-organized.

Brandon College, being private, was not a cheap school to attend. Wanda's family was not all that well-to-do, owing mostly to Dad's having taken off for parts unknown fifteen years before (gee, thanks, Dad). Wanda's mom did her best, but with Wanda and her older brother Jimmy to support, she worked one full-time and one part-time job and still barely made ends meet. San Francisco is not an easy town to survive in if you're in the lower middle class.

Fortunately Wanda was bright. Not brilliant, mind—but intelligent and quick and most of all, determined and organized. And she did not mind hard work. She had done well in high school and Brandon College had offered her a scholarship that just barely brought the cost of attending there just within her reach, and so on an August day two years earlier, Mom had driven her from San Francisco thirty miles north to the little town of Colston and to the Brandon campus.

Mom had offered her a hundred dollars, which Wanda had refused, with a smile. "You guys need this more than I'm do. I'm OK for tuition, books, and fees." Still—well, Wanda would like a little extra money for nicer clothes, nicer shoes, an occasional movie or off-campus meal with her friends. Becoming an R.A. in her junior year meant her room rent and dorm fees were waived, an incredibly significant easing of her financial burdens. And every summer she went home and took up her old summer job again, an assistant in the Children's Department of the local library.

She had very little time for herself, and her summer savings stretched only so far. So—beginning September first, any girl on the third floor whose boyfriend had broken up with her, who had failed a critical exam, who suspected her roommate of pilfering her makeup or money, whatever, any girl with any problem at all, major or minor, came and knocked on the door of Room 301 and dumped her woes on Wanda.

And Wanda handled the problems. The other first-time R.A., Junior Nicole Kaufman, up on the fifth floor was more popular, more outgoing, and—this was hardest for Wanda to admit, but true—friendlier. Toward the end of September, when a girl on her floor came to her and sounded not only bothered, but desperate—Wanda took something the girl said as a hint at suicide—Wanda actually called Nicole and asked her to come down and help out.

And Selene Maggio, the girl who was so upset by her boyfriend, car, and academic troubles, had spoken to Nicole for only two minutes before Selene collapsed in her arms and cried it out. In another ten minutes, Wanda had called Student Counseling and she and Nicole walked Selene over, where a kindly middle-aged professional summoned her into a consultation room.

As she and Nicole walked back, Wanda said, "I'm no good at this. I shouldn't be doing this."

"You did the right thing," Nicole said. "You did what I or any other R.A. should do—you asked for help. We need it sometimes just as much as the girls who come to see us."

"But I tried all the things they taught us. It didn't work."

Nicole hugged her. "You just have to be warmer, that's all. Treat everyone who comes in like a friend. Or like a sister."

"That's kind of hard for me," Wanda admitted. "I never had a sister, and I—I guess I never had many friends. I had to work part time all through high school, and, you know—I just never had free time to hang out with friends." She smiled. "I would've loved to have a sister, but I was stuck with an older brother. I mean, Jimmy's always been nice to me, but he's four years older."

Patting her shoulder, Nicole said, "Now you've got thirty-six sisters. Remember that. You need to be someone in authority so the girls will know to come to you with problems, but you've got to be a friend, too, so they'll trust you and not be afraid to come and see you. Big sister to everyone, even the ones older than you."

"I don't know how to do that. But I'll try."

That same weekend, at the R.A. meeting with Mrs. Rickard, the dorm supervisor, a possible way came up. Mrs. Norma Rickard, the head of staff for the dormitory, went through the usual reports and comments—who'd been referred to counseling services, who needed a pat on the back or a little help, students who would like a study buddy to keep them on track, so on and so forth. They met in the small conference room adjoining her apartment, the largest living quarters in Dowling Hall.

Then she said, "Let's talk about morale."

Wanda immediately wondered _Is she talking about me? Or to me?_ She couldn't tell Mrs. Rickard was about forty, still young-looking but with traces of gray in her raven-black hair. She had tennis muscles and a trim figure, and though she'd never been less than kind, Wanda couldn't help thinking that Norma had doubts that this new R.A. could handle the job. However—

Mrs. Rickard went on: "We have close to two hundred girls in the dormitory, and a hundred and forty of them are new. Forty are transfers, and about a hundred are freshmen. About half of those have never spent a week away from home and family before. And each and every girl is an individual. Two hundred sets of worries, of insecurities, of fears and troubles and—well, you know as well as I do how many different problems they have among them. What we need to do—and what you Resident Assistants have to do—is to give them a sense that they're not on their own. That every Dowling Hall girl is a sister, and that the whole dorm is a substitute family for them."

Luisa Vega, second floor, Senior and R.A., said, "How about—well, I don't know—this may be silly."

"We're not going to make fun of you," Norma said, smiling. "This is a safe room."

"Not until they replace the carpet," Myra Clonfort, fourth floor, senior, said.

The little conference room on the first floor had at one time been a vending room at one time, and the soda and snack machines had worn holes in the carpets. Like seven years earlier. Every month the holes seemed to rip a little more. And every year the carpet had been due for replacement, but other jobs got priority, and—well, the upshot was that you had to be careful not to snag your toe.

"Maintenance is replacing the carpet this winter break for sure," Norma said. "And if they still don't do it, let's all get together and rip it up in January!"

They cheered. The carpet was not only torn and a hazard, but it was outstandingly ugly, a muddy brown made darker by long-ago soda spills. "See?" Norma asked. "This is what we need to inspire in the residents—a sense of having fun together, of sharing something. Now, Luisa, what were you going to suggest?"

"Something like that," Luisa said. "A team effort, I mean. We've got about a month until Halloween. Why don't we plan a big Halloween party? Costume contest, maybe a dance? And all the girls in the dorm can help work on it—"

When Luisa trailed off, Nicole took it up: "We could have a door decoration contest. Maybe round up some prizes. Nothing really big, but fun things, you know."

And before Wanda knew it, they were deep into plans for a whole month of little activities leading up to Halloween and ending in a silly but fun Halloween party and dance. "Let's get the other dorms in on this," Wanda heard herself suggest. "We can make it campus-wide. Use the Student Center for the dance and party, maybe."

"When is Halloween?" asked Heather suddenly.

"It's October 31st this year," Nicole said with a grin.

Heather rolled her eyes. "What day of the _week_?"

"Tuesday, I think," Wanda said.

"That's right, Norma confirmed. "So I'd suggest having the party and dance the weekend before that. The 28th would be Saturday. Too early, do you girls think?"

No, none of them thought that at all. "If we start next Saturday to involve all the girls," Heather said, "that'd give us four weeks in October until the party."

"Well, Heather, you'd be the chairwoman of this effort," Norma said. "Are you up for it?"

"Oh, sure," Heather said. She had that kind of enigmatic voice that could be sarcastic, could be joking, or could be serious, and Wanda could never quite tell what the tone was. "Providing everybody else will help. What about it, girls? Will you all pitch in and get your floors to agree to work on this project?"

"We can have a hall meeting on Saturday afternoon," Nicole said. "I mean, every floor can have its own meeting. We just need to coordinate what we want to present to them and what they can volunteer to do."

"The dance," Myra said. "Are we going to let girls invite friends from off-campus, or is it strictly a Brandon College deal?"

"I think we'll get more backing from the administration if we limit it to our students," Norma said. "The party could be a college mixer. There are lots of freshman boys and girls who might be looking for—"

"An epic college romance," Wanda blurted.

Everyone laughed. Wanda blushed. "Just joking," she said.

"No, it's a good idea," Heather told her. "And a Halloween costume ball would be a fun way to get guys and girls together. Let's figure out a theme to fit that."

From then on the R.A.'s tossed ideas back and forth: Princesses and Princes, Favorite Movie Monsters, Urban Legends, Superheroines and Heroes, and on and on. Finally, Wanda asked, "Couldn't we just suggest all of them? I mean, they could be categories for costumes. Each category could be judged, and we could have a first, second, and third-place winner."

"Boy-girl teams!" Luisa said. "That could be a whole category. You know, matching costumes, like Batman and Batgirl—"

"Batman and Sexy Robin!" Heather said. "Oops! Sorry, Mrs. Rickard!"

"I don't think we should put that idea in people's heads," Norma said, though she looked amused. "I know college students. It would get out of hand way too fast. So we need to have, um, modesty guidelines that everybody has to observe. If the costumes are too daring, they're disqualified. We'll need to make that clear."

They created two committees—only two or three people each—to look into such things as reserving the Student Center, soliciting prizes from the businesses around campus, finding someone to DJ (Heather advised "That'll be easy. There's always some guy who'll do that for free food and maybe twenty bucks. And he gets to be the center of attention. I'll send you guys a list of about five guys to sound out about it."), refreshments, stuff like that. Wanda and Luisa were taking care of those concerns.

Wanda said, "That's a lot for two of us."

Norma reassured her: "You and Luisa just set the agenda. You'll be able to recruit some girls from your floors to help with the actual work."

The other team was more aesthetic—they'd set up the guidelines for the door-decoration contest, settle on the costume-contest guidelines, create a decorating team to set up the Student Center, and so on.

"Now, about refreshments," Norma said. "We have a small entertainment budget. When you decide on a menu, come and see me and let's either arrange to buy what we need or to get some donations to help out. Or do we want to sell tickets?"

"That's a hassle," Heather said. "And there's always jerks who party-crash."

"But maybe a couple of dollars per person," Wanda said. "That would add up, and we could have better refreshments and decorations."

"Well—think it over, once you decide what you want to serve," Heather advised. "Let's all touch bases Friday afternoon, but let's go ahead and schedule the floor meetings for Saturday. We've found by experience that the best time to set up a meeting—I mean when we get the best attendance—is like around two in the afternoon. But tell your girls up front it'll only run an hour, and stick to that. And make it sound like fun!"

"We'll try our best," Luisa said.

Wanda left the meeting feeling a little better. Darn it, she was a junior this year. She shouldn't be so insecure. By now she should know she'd be up for a challenge.

Except—well, she wasn't.

That evening she and Nicole walked over to the Gag—the students' nickname for the Brandon College dining hall, though its way-too-fancy formal name was "Le Gastronome"—for dinner. On the way, they talked about how many girls it would take to set up a really good dance.

As they crossed the grassy quad between the Student Center and the Gag, something thunked hard against the back of Wanda's head. "Ow!"

"Look out!" A guy's voice rang out slightly after the nick of time.

Rubbing her head, Wanda irritably bent over and picked up the red Frisbee that had hit her. "Too late, jerk!"

The guy came running up. A skinny, tall guy, not bad-looking, though kind of dorky. "Sorry! I missed catching it. Little help?"

Wanda deliberately tossed the Frisbee way over his head, and one of the guys who'd been sailing it around with him made a run and leap and caught it.

"Thanks," the skinny guy said, nervously rubbing the back of his neck. He had messy medium-length dark brown hair, with two odd little cowlicky floofs at the back, and was wearing a red-and-white Brandon College football-style jersey and raggedy cut-off jeans. He stood awkwardly. "Uh, are you OK, though? Did it hurt you?"

"It didn't feel good!" Wanda snapped.

"My fault," he said. "I apologize. Uh, my name's Alex."

"Good for you," Wanda said. "Come on, Nicky." She strode off toward the Gag.

And much to her irritation, Nicole yelled back at the guy: "She's Wandelle Mabel Bailey, Dowling Hall! Call the desk later if you want to make sure she doesn't have a concussion! Just ask for Wanda, though, she hates the other names!"

With her face burning, Wanda yelled, "Nicole!"

"Come on," Nicky said, laughing. "He's cute."

"He's probably a freshman. All nose and scruff. Let's go."

"He's waving at you!"

At the door of the dining hall, Wanda glanced back over her shoulder. "No, he's not. He's throwing that stupid Frisbee with his buddies."

"Made you look, though!" Nicole said.

"You are such a drip."

"At least I go on dates."

"Oh," Wanda said, "shut up!"

* * *


	2. Tales in the Dark

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**2: Tales in the Dark**

* * *

_1-The Girls in 313._

"This is totally stupid," Melissa Alewine complained. "I can't even read the letters."

True, at nine P.M. and with the curtains drawn, the door closed, and the lights switched off, the dorm room lay dark. "Hang on, hang on," Melissa's roommate Rebecca Thebalt told her. She scratched the third match in a row—her hands shook a little, and the first two had flickered out prematurely—and then finally managed to light the candle, six inches long and two in diameter, one of those decorative pillar candles. It wasn't scented, but the odor of hot melting wax rose from it. "Is that better?"

Mel wasn't prepared to let go of her grumpy mood. "Yeah, now I can read the letters and it's still stupid." She was a pretty—not beautiful, exactly, but pretty—girl, eighteen, a freshman, petite and blonde and blue-eyed. Since she and her roommate were already in their pajamas, she'd taken out her contacts and wore her pink-rimmed glasses, the lenses meant to correct her near-sightedness making her eyes look a little small for her face.

"Not really as stupid as you make it sound," returned Becca. She was almost the same age—really only two months and a few days older—and was a touch on the chubby side, with reddish-brown hair that curled in tight ringlets naturally. Cheerful and sassy, with round, pink cheeks, Becca rarely sounded as serious as she did about the stupidity of the whole idea. She seemed especially irritated at Mel's dismissal of the thing on the floor between them—the stupid thing, as Mel said.

To be more specific, the stupid thing was a home-made Ouija board, an 11 x 14 sheet of art paper resting on the floor beneath a slightly larger clear rectangle of Plexiglas. In a two-line arc, A to N and O to Z, ranged the alphabet, the letters a little ragged because they'd been hand-printed with small felt-tipped markers. Beneath them, in a straight row, Rebecca had written the numbers 0-9. In the upper left corner was the printed word "YES" and and in the upper right the matching word "NO." At the bottom center was the word "GOODBYE."

The paper, heavy enough to be suitable for watercolors or inks, was really white. The single candle that now illuminated the dormitory room made it look yellow. Melissa frankly felt a bit creeped out. The weak light cast a strange spell on the dorm room. The twin beds that loomed over the girls, who sprawled on the floor, looked dim and gray and might have been a couple of dozing hippos. Glass and metal—the family photo on Mel's bedside table, the brass lamp base on Becca's—caught and reflected the candle flame, which writhed in reflection like a worm of fire.

"If we're going to do this stupid stuff," Mel said, "let's get it done."

For a pointer, they'd experimented with different potentially slippy-slidey things. A shot glass seemed somehow to catch on the Plexiglas. A triangle cut from carboard dragged. Finally, somewhere Becca—never "Becky!"—had found a two-inch stainless-steel fender washer with a half-inch hole in the center. That seemed to glide over the surface better and more smoothly than the alternatives, so they were going with that.

"It's not stupid," Becca insisted as she put the washer on the Plexiglas with a _click_ and moved it around with a fingernail. It slid across the smooth surface with hardly any resistance. "I read it in a book."

"Stupid book, then," Mel grumbled.

"You're just scared."

Mel punched her glasses into place. They tended to slip down on her snub nose. "Am not. I said let's do it, didn't I?"

The stupid book was a 1976 reprint and English translation of a book originally published in 1965 in France by a journalist, Raymond Sorcier, under the title _Les secrets d'un monde inconnu._ The rather garishly-illustrated paperback English version was called _Lost Secrets of the Antient Wizards,_ translated by Phil Bricel, M.A. He had evidently thought that a more exact rendering, such as "Secrets of an Unknown World," wouldn't be catchy enough. Whatever, the material was neither well-written nor organized.

That might not have been a significant difference from the original French work, since that had been hurriedly composed on the heels of a fantastically (and inexplicably) best-selling book by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, _Le Matin des magiciens_. That had been a mish-mash compendium of conspiracy theories, ancient legends, superstitious beliefs, secret societies, a dash of cryptozoology, and the kitchen sink. Translated into English by Rollo Myers and published in England as _The Dawn of Magic_ and in the USA as _The Morning of the Magicians,_ it became an international publishing sensation in the era when rock bands and young people everywhere experimented with mysticism, meditation, and informal pharmaceuticals. Of course that book's great success inspired homages, imitations, and rip-offs.

Had Stan Pines been a little older and patient enough to have been inspired by _The Morning of the Magicians,_ if he'd had the persistence to sit down and write a lot of silly, rambling, paranormal-sounding stuff he'd researched the easy way (by making it up), he might have produced such a book. However, Stan's brother was the writer in the family, and Ford was not interested in writing for a popular audience, so the opportunity passed them both by.

Anyway, _Lost Secrets of the Antient Wizards_ was a big old jumble of mysticism and magic and hot steaming piles of pure speculation. One chapter, Becca's favorite, "The Baffling Boards" (French title: _Les planches qui parlent_ , which should give you an idea of the accuracy of the translation), was a confusing, disjointed account of "boards that speak." If you had enough tolerance for jibber-jabber jargon to untangle the spaghetti-knots of sentences, you might latch onto the realization that Sorcier and his translator Bricel were discussing the objects that most people call Ouija boards.

Actually, though, "Ouija Board" is a trademarked parlor game owned by Hasbro, invented in Baltimore, Maryland, by Elijah Bond in 1890, and then redesigned and successfully marketed by William Fuld eleven years later.

Despite early success—sort of the Monopoly of its time—it had become strictly a niche item in 1990s America. Its greatest popularity had flowered and faded in the 1920s, but its roots twined back to the ghost-seeking craze that began, at least in the United States, with the Fox Sisters. In 1848, these sprightly gals began holding séances and conversing—they said—with the spirits of the dead.

The dead didn't actually talk out loud. They communicated with raps. No, not like "Hey, hey, whattaya say, like I done said, I dead, dead, dead," but raps like in knocking on wood. Usually one rap for "yes," two for "no," like this: "Hey, is there a spirit here?" KNOCK. "Are you a scary ghost?" KNOCK, KNOCK. And so it goes.

By the way, the Fox sisters cheated, as one of them, Maggie, much later confessed. They produced the raps at first by tying a string to the stem of an apple and moving it up and down like a fruity puppet, making it knock against the floor beneath their bed. Later on, Maggie developed the talent of snapping her big and second toes like someone snapping their fingers. Had she lived long enough, that might have got her a spot on "America's Got Talent," but she probably wouldn't have made it past the first round.

However, sometimes the sisters did not rely on simple yes-or-no raps, but printed out the alphabet and held a pendulum over it. When the pendulum was over a letter the ghost liked, it made little circles. They copied the letters down and slowly, slowly, one letter at a time, short messages developed. "Spirit, what is your worst regret about your life on Earth?" NEVER FINISHED READING MOBY DICK.

From there to a "talking board," which is what paranormalists called the concept between the time of the Fox sisters and Elijah Bond's version of 1890, was but a short step, though the would-be mystics used a pointy little slider, a planchette, instead of a pendulum. The notion was that two sitters touched the planchette without consciously moving it. The visiting ghost would propel it, pausing at the spook's chosen letters to spell out messages to the living.

Really that was not much of a pedigree for a magical object, but, as the book claimed, the original version of a talking board was first invented long, long ago by the Chinese in the eleventh century AD. Chinese fortune-readers must have had great patience, because there are 54,678 characters in their written language, along with nine million bicycles in Beijing.

Anyway, here we are, way off the track. Let's get back to that occasion. What Becca and Mel had created that Sunday (October first, in fact) was more closely patterned on the Ouija board than on the Chinese one. Becca and her friends had experimented with similar ones before, and she confidently asserted that a home-made talking board produced better paranormal effects than one bought in a toy store. Mel thought it was a load of bovine leavings. Not to mention stupid, though to be sure she did mention it over and over.

But, you know, roomies, and to tell the truth, she was a little curious, so they lay on their stomachs on the dorm-room floor, across from each other on the opposite sides of the board, Becca carefully placed the big washer on the glass between the alphabet and "GOODBYE," and then she droned, "Oh, powers of the world beyond, we come humbly as supplicants seeking wisdom. Favor us with your attention. Powers of the Light, defend us. Allow no evil thing to approach us, but let the kindly spirits come forward to guide us in our quest. In the name of all that is good, grant us your help."

As Becca had earlier instructed, when she reached out and put one forefinger on the washer, Mel did the same.

"Don't push down," Becca warned. "Just a light touch."

"Right."

"Here in the darkness, with one blessed candle only to give us light, we supplicants seek knowledge. Does anyone hear us?"

An utterly spectacular lack of results followed.

Seconds crept by. The floor started to feel cold through he cotton of Mel's pajamas. "Boring," she whispered.

Becca whispered back: "Be patient." Louder, she asked, "Are there any spirits in our presence?" Nothing. Then "Are we in the presence of any spirits?"

"Probably date night for them," Mel said after a few quiet minutes during which the washer refused to move. "Great. The dead have a better social life than I do."

Quietly, Becca insisted, "Just wait. Sometimes it takes half an hour."

Mel shifted her position, grunting. "Sheesh, I can't lie on the hard floor that long! Let's put the board on the desk and sit like regular people."

In a grudging voice, Becca unbent: "Well—yeah, floor is kinda uncomfortable. Maybe that's interfering with our concentration."

"Hey, spirits, time out," Mel said. "Let us get more comfortable and then we'll talk."

They moved the board to the desk they shared, pulled up the two chairs, and sat opposite each other, each with a finger again on the washer. They had to stack up a few books so the candle in its holder sat higher than the board and managed to illuminate everything.

Then Becca went through the here-we-are-are-you-there deal again.

After a slow hour crawled by like an injured beetle, Mel squirmed and said, "Calling time again here. I have to pee. Let's quit for the night."

"OK," Becca said. "But I swear, me and my friends have made it work before. Hang on one second before you go to the bathroom. Gotta do this."

She moved the washer until it was over the word GOODBYE.

"Now can I go?" Mel asked.

"Yeah. You have to do this, see, because if you don't, it's like leaving the door open for spirits to sneak in."

"My family had a cat that would do that," Mel said. She went down the hall to the communal bathroom—bummer, the two newest dorms at least had marginally more private shared bathrooms, one between every two rooms, one potty and one shower for four girls. But you had to make do with what you had.

When she returned, Becca had switched on the lights and blown out the candle, which sent up a thin stream of blue-gray smoke, like an animated map of a river as it changed its course. "Maybe we can try again at midnight," she said.

"Classes tomorrow," Mel reminded her, turning down the sheet and blankets.

"Well—if we're still awake."

She sounded so hopeful that Mel unbent a little: "Only if we stop by half-past twelve, OK?"

"OK."

They left it at that, but as Mel had figured would happen, they were both sound asleep by midnight.

Probably just as well, in light of what later happened.

* * *

_2-Doubters and Believers_

Melissa's English teacher, Mr. Bledsloe, was almost always five to ten minutes late to class, giving the students time to chat. English Comp was a small class to be on the freshman level, capping at twenty students per section. Mel's English Comp was boring—all of the students were freshmen, and the girls were just barely interesting and there were no hunky boys in the class at all, just six pimply nerds and one heavyweight jock.

Still, Mel was outgoing enough to be friendly with some of the girls. On Monday morning, Mel told Denise Franklin, a casual friend with black hair and an olive complexion that made her look sort of exotic, of the failed experiment with the home-made Ouija board.

"I wouldn't do that for a million dollars," Denise said. "It's dangerous. You hear stories."

"Like what?" Mel asked her.

Denise looked a little uncomfortable, but she shrugged. "Oh, I don't know. Some kids played with one of those boards and they all committed suicide or something. Back in high school a friend of mine told me about a friend of a friend of hers that got, I don't know, possessed by a ghost or demon or something and went crazy and had to be locked up."

Mel gave her a skeptical smile. "Everybody's heard that kind of story. I don't think that stuff's real, anyway."

"What's not real?" asked Alison Ransome, over on Denise's left.

"Ouija boards. Talking to the dead," Denise said.

"My sister once spent the night in a haunted house with some friends of hers," Alison said. "They saw some like floating orbs, pale green lights I mean, and they heard some footsteps walking around, but it turned out to be her dumb boyfriend trying to scare them all." She leaned close and whispered something to Denise. Mel couldn't understand what she said, but Denise laughed out loud.

And at that point, Mr. Bledsoe, his pale brown hair wild and his shirt collar turned up on one side—he wasn't a sharp dresser—hurried in, saying, "Settle down, settle down, and let me call the roll." He adjusted his glasses and started with Reese Abbot and went on from there.

For the next hour, they had to concentrate on the differences between declarative, interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory sentences. The hour was truthfully boring. Was it informative? Figure that out for yourself. How dull some classes can be!

When the dullness index trended down at the end of the period, Mel asked Denise, "What happened to the guy in Alison's story?"

Denise told her, and they had a good laugh. Oh, what the girls did to that boy—if the story was even true, and Mel had her doubts—was funny.

Funnier to girls than to guys, but still.

That afternoon Mel got back to the dorm before Becca did. Mel lay stretched out on her bed, reading her history chapter. Becca put her books on the desk and said, "You shouldn't have moved this, Mel."

"Move what?" Mel asked.

"The planchette," Becca said. "You moved it, didn't you?"

Mel glanced over. Becca looked upset. Mel said, "Haven't touched it. You mean the washer? Haven't been close to it."

"Well, I left it on GOODBYE, and now it's right over NO."

"I didn't touch it. Maybe one of us bumped the desk."

"It should be here." With a fingertip, Becca moved the washer back, so the D of GOODBYE showed through the central hole. She clicked it down decisively.

After a second, the washer slipped silently back to the word NO.

"How'd you make it do that?" Mel asked.

Becca had turned pale. "I think we'd better put this thing away," she said.

Mel sat up on the edge of the bed, her head tilted. "Come on, how'd you make it move like that?"

Becca just stared at her, her expression so dismayed that, for the first time, Melissa started to think there just might be something in this that—well, that wasn't stupid, after all.

Disturbing, certainly.

Stupid, not so much.

* * *


	3. Friend of a Friend of a Friend . . .

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**3: Friend of a Friend of a Friend . . .**

* * *

_1-Don't Try This at Home_

"Ouija boards don't work," Caty told Becca in PE class (Tennis 2) on Wednesday afternoon. They were waiting their turn to do a few mixed-doubles volleys. It was a sunny day, and the oddly musical _pong! Pong! Pong!_ of tennis ball against racquets punctuated their talk. "My brother had one, and he couldn't make it work. I got it from him, and it was a dud for me, too."

"My friends and me have made them work," Becca said. "We talked to somebody's grandmother once."

"Fault!" Mrs. Delfino called.

Sounding doubtful, Cathy asked, "What did the granny say?"

Becca shrugged. "She just told us to dress warm and always put on clean underwear before we left the house."

"Ha!"

"Well, it did sound like a grandmother might say something like that. Besides, there was other stuff, too," Becca insisted. "I don't know. Maybe Mel is too skeptical or something. You know, anybody who's too skeptical keeps this kind of thing from succeeding."

Caty clapped as Shawn, one of the players on the court, pulled off a nice save and scored. "I read where Ouija boards are just games. Like Monopoly. Monopoly isn't magic."

"All I know," Becca said defensively, "is that when my high-school posse and me fooled around with the board, the planchette really moved and we weren't pushing it. This one time, this girl Leslie, real smart, kinda geeky, she was kind of a grade grubber, really—"

"Thebault! Rossiter! You're up!" Mrs. Delfino shouted, and the two girls had to break off their chat for the next minutes as they took their places on Court 1 and started to volley with Sandy Brodin and Sheldon Unger.

Becca was a good player and pulled off some impressive backhands, though she had to work at a tendency to rush the net that Mrs. Delfino kept reminding her to watch. Sandy wasn't a beginner, but as a partner he didn't measure up to Becca's skill level. Caty and Sheldon averaged out as better overall and would have beaten them in a real game.

Finally Mrs. Delfino blasted the whistle to wrap up the class. "That's it for today. Hit the showers!"

In the girls' locker room, as they got back into their street clothes, Caty said, "So what were you gonna say about that girl? The geek, you said?"

"Let's get a soda," Becca said. They walked over to the Student Center and bought a couple of Cokes in the coffee shop and sat in the afternoon sun out on the terrace to sip them. "Yeah, I was talking about Leslie," Becca said. "OK, little backstory on her. She's like a math genius or something, but not a total dweeb, you know. I mean, she dresses OK and likes stuff and she had a couple or three boyfriends, she's not like a total hermit or anything. I mean, she's smart, but she's all right, you know."

"Yeah, so what about her?" Cathy asked.

"Well, one night when she was sleeping over, she and I were fooling around with the board, you know, not a bought one, one we made, anyway. Where was I? OK, we were sitting there in my room, lights off, right? And a candle so we could see the board. The planchette started to move. And I swear I wasn't pushing it, and it scared Leslie when it moved, and she jerked her fingers off it. I told her to chill, 'cause that's what it's supposed to do, you know?"

"So that was it?" Cathy asked. "Sounds like she was just scared."

"No, wait, wait. Let me finish. So I talked Leslie into sitting down again and we started all over again. So we tried the invocation, you know, asking if there was any kind of spirit there that wanted to talk to us, and so on. The planchette started to move—you know, at fist it just sort of makes little aimless circles. Leslie was all breathing hard and everything, but she wasn't tripping or anything. I asked the board 'Is there a spirit here?' The planchette went and pointed to the word YES."

"Cool," Cathy said. "So who was it?"

"I'm getting to that. OK, so it was Leslie's turn to ask a question. She was still pretty out of the frame, you know, scared and all, so she asked, 'Are you a good spirit?' And like zap! The planchette zooms to NO."

"Get out of town!" Cathy exclaimed.

"Word!" Becca said. "And Leslie totally lost it, and she jumped up, slapping at herself like this—" she frantically brushed her chest, as if trying to chase a swarm of bugs off her. "And she freaked, so my Dad had to drive her home, even though she lived like five houses down the street from us, 'cause she was like, wack. And we'd been friends since, like, the fourth grade, but from then on, she wouldn't come back to my house, even in the daytime. She didn't cut me loose, we were OK after a few days, but she wasn't ever the same friend she'd been."

"Huh," Cathy said. "If it was me, I would totally have talked to the evil spirit!"

Becca smiled. "That was the only time that one of them was supposedly evil. Except for that one time, whenever we got an answer, it was like somebody's grandmother or great-grandfather, somebody like that. Except once Judy talked to the spirit of her cat that had been run over. But none of them claimed to be evil, and none of them were ever scary or anything."

"I don't know. I can't take it serious, but, you know, something moved the thingy and said it was evil, I might freak a little. And I think after I got over it, I'd be convinced the things weren't real ghosts or whatever. What I've read is that when the—what is the pointer thing?"

"Planchette. The real ones have a hole in them and they're Valentine-shaped."

"Planchette. OK, I've read that the planchette moves because the people with their fingers on it are, like, unconsciously moving it. Unconsciously? Do I mean subconsciously?"

"I've heard that, too," Becca admitted. "It's got a name, some kind of effect, only I don't remember what it is. But I swear, me and my posse, we tried our best not to move it, but it moved anyways. Anyhow, it convinced me that there's something to the Ouija board, even though there were lots of times when it didn't work at all. The planchette just sat there. That was what happened when I tried it with Mel the other night. Nothing. Zip."

"Yeah well, you should've tried mirror magic," Cathy said. "It scares the pee out of you, but every time I've tried it, it worked."

"What kind of mirror magic?" Becca asked.

"Bloody Mary," Cathy told her. She had finished her Coke, but she tilted the paper cup back and crunched the ice.

"Oh, that," Becca said. "That's so five years ago! I mean, we tried that when I was in the Brownies. Nothing happened."

"Too young, it works better when you're past puberty," Cathy said. "I can't say I ever saw a full-on ghost, but stuff has looked real weird in the mirror when I've done it. My reflection got all distorted. I wanted to see the ghost, only I've heard that once you get a glimpse of Bloody Mary, you got to run out of the room or turn on the lights immediately, because if you don't, something awful happens."

"What?"

"Don't know," Cathy replied. "Nobody's ever survived!" She laughed. "Look at your face! I scared you."

"No you didn't."

"I did! I did, too!"

"Oh, talk to the hand," Becca said, although she was smiling. "Honest to God, now, did you really see anything in the mirror when you tried?"

"Word," Cathy said. "Three times. My face got all strange, too long and kind of crooked. Or my eyes turned weird. The candle reflected in them, and they got huge and all black. Every time, though, I turned on the light as that started to happen. Some of my friends say they saw the bloody-faced ghost standing behind them a time or two."

"How do you do it?" Becca asked.

"What, the ritual or whatever? You really want to know?"

"Yep. Maybe I can get my roommate to try that with me."

Caty dropped her voice to a confidential whisper: "Before I even start, the important thing, the thing you have to remember, is if you're looking in the mirror and you see a figure standing behind you, turn on the light, get out of there, but don't look around! Whatever you do—don't look behind you."

"Got it," Becca said coolly. "Now—how do you do it?"

* * *

_2-Mirrors, Magic, and Mysteries_

Several centuries or so ago, in a country whose name really doesn't matter, a tall, skinny, scraggly-bearded old wizard once idly and just for fun enchanted a mirror. There wasn't anything special about it, except it was an anachronism.

Most mirrors in that period of history were made of polished metal, most often bronze, but the wizard had used magic to create one more in the mode of the Art Deco age that was yet to come. But though magically created, the mirror was nothing special—it was merely, as mirrors were in the Art Deco period, a pane of glass with a thin, reflective silver coating on the back side, mounted on a black-painted wood backboard and surrounded by a cheap gilt frame. Very mundane.

But once the wizard had cast the initial spell, the mirror acquired the mystic ability to show visions of the future. True, the visions were usually restricted to part of one inning of a not particularly interesting baseball game between the Cubs and the Giants, but _something_ magical was going on with it. It could also speak, answering the wizard's questions, but it was awfully sarcastic, something of a smart-glass. And it sang—badly, though.

And that mirror . . . that was but a drop in the bucket.

In the Middle Ages, witches and warlocks were infamous for using crystal balls to peer at things far remote in time or in place or in both. However, anyone with sufficient knowledge of and skill at magic did not need your fancy-shmancy crystal balls made of flawless quartz. For them, a bowl brim-full of plain old water with one drop of oil floating on the surface was just as good as a crystal. The process is called scrying.

But sometimes instead of water or crystals, witches and warlocks used glass mirrors. These weren't particularly good—the glass was usually bubbled and wavery, and because of the difficulty of producing glass in larger sizes, the mirrors tended to be only three or four inches in diameter, roughly plano-convex, and backed with lead, which gave a dull reflection. In fact, until 1835, when Justus von Liebig of Giessen, Germany, discovered the process of coating one surface of glass with silver, only the poor, who couldn't afford expensive metal mirrors, used the small glass models.

Well, the poor and sorcerers and witches, that is. Every self-respecting magic-wielder had his or her own scrying glass. And if some were too poor even for that, there was always a neighbor witch who'd be willing to share. Sometimes they'd even invite every witch or warlock in the area over to gossip, snack, and take turns using a particularly good mirror. Their motto was "It's my party, and I'll scry if I want to."

Where were we? Right, mirrors and magic and demons, oh my.

In the fifteenth century, St. Teresa of Avila gazed at a glass window one dark morning and saw her own reflection, surrounded by visions of demonic faces. Later, she had a terrifying vision of hell.

A reputed sorcerer, Count Cagliostro, who lived in the eighteenth century, reportedly could tell people what was happening hundreds or thousands of miles away at any given time, and one witness said the Count got the information by gazing into a small glass mirror in a darkened room, with only a single candle lit. Cagliostro supposedly told the witness that he had trapped a minor demon in the mirror and that it could not escape until it had answered 9,999 questions for him.

Not many people know it, but certain dark whispers arose about an unlikely book written in the nineteenth century. In 1865, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson—"reverend" somewhat by courtesy, since he was a deacon but never was ordained as a priest in the Church of England—wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll a book called _Alice in Wonderland_ , in which he fictionalized some excursions he, a friend, and a group of children, including Alice Liddell, had enjoyed one summer, during which Dodgson made up fairy tales for his young audience.

Then six years later he published a sequel, _Through the Looking-Glass,_ in which his fictional heroine went through a mirror, ending up in a fantasy land where everything was mirror-reversed, even thoughts, even logic. On the far side of the glass, you had to run as hard as you could to stay in one place.

What people darkly whispered, though, was that the looking-glass book was not the true story. Carroll had bowdlerized the tale. Because what had actually happened, they said, was that the instant Alice pushed into the mirror—her mirror image pushed out and into our world.

And that mirror Alice, now loose in the real world, was an eldritch monster.

Perhaps one day the world will be ready for the shocking tale of how Carroll and some allies desperately fought to thrust the mirror Alice back into the alternate world, rescuing the real Alice, who was, they say, never quite the same again. One day that may all come out—but not now.

The point is that mirror demons have been around in folk tales for a long, long time. And Bloody Mary is one.

The actual Bloody Mary—not a mirror image, but the real person—was Mary Tudor, Queen Mary I of England from 1553-1558. Mary, a Catholic, instituted a persecution of Protestants during her time on the throne. Protestant propagandists, like John Foxe, saddled her with the opprobrious nickname of "Bloody Mary."

Foxe's _Book of Martyrs,_ by the way, is full of ghastly explicit descriptions of inhuman tortures inflicted on Protestants during Mary's reign and in the nineteenth century the book emerged as a favorite entertainment for adolescents who had been born too soon to be able to watch _The Walking Dead_ on TVs that had yet to be invented. Most editions of the _Book of Martyrs_ included horrifying illustrations of people being terribly and deliberately cruel to their fellow humans. Lots of flames, blood and guts.

The mirror entity called Bloody Mary, though—surprisingly, as demonic entities go, she's a late-comer. The legend was first recorded in 1978, and it goes back only to the 1960s, so far as we know. It's somewhat similar to the Japanese legend of Hanako-san, a young female toilet ghost. You can look it up.

Anyway, the story revolves around a psychological-but-perhaps-physiological phenomenon: If one goes into a dark room with only a single, dim light source and then stares at one's reflection in a mirror, eventually the low level of sensory input causes one to hallucinate. One's features may change, or one may glimpse dim, shadowy figures behind one. These seem to be just optical illusions, startling but not threatening.

Somehow this morphed into the legend.

Nobody knows exactly what Bloody Mary is: Some say that, like Hanako-san, she is the ghost of a human girl who either committed suicide or was murdered; others say she is a demon; others say she's a fiendish mad creature from some alternate dimension; and many say she's just the product of overactive imaginations.

The stories vary in detail, but cut to the bone, they essentially say that someone (usually for some reason, girls at sleepovers) should go into a dark room, preferably a bathroom with a nice big mirror, turn out the lights, light a single candle, and stare at their reflections in the mirror while chanting "Bloody Mary" thirteen times. Sometimes you're supposed to turn in circles while chanting it, opening your eyes as you face the mirror and chant the name.

At the end of the ritual, they say, the girls will glimpse a hideous figure, Bloody Mary her own self, will appear in the mirror. And she may, oh, I don't know, grab a girl and choke her to death, or pluck out her eyes, or do something else really unfriendly. In 1995, virtually every girl of college age knew someone who knew someone who had heard of someone's doing the Bloody Mary bit and dying or suffering some gruesome mutilation.

It's nonsense, of course. It never really happened.

Nothing about the hideous figure in the mirror could remotely, by any stretch of the imagination, possibly be, in any fashion, true.

Except—

Um, OK. Gonna say it.

Just don't try this at home.

Or at someone else's home, for that matter.

Or in school.

Or in the bathroom at the mall.

Come to think of it, just to be on the safe side—

Don't try this at all.

We'll soon find out why.

* * *


	4. Reflections in a Darkened Room

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**4: Reflections in a Darkened Room**

_1-Taking Names_

You know how it is when you begin some group effort. It tends to take on a life of its own. An intimate get-together inexplicably morphs into a general party, where people you don't even know come into your house and make a mess and spill out onto the lawn and then your mom and dad get back . . ..

Ah, where would TV sitcoms be without the Unexpected Consequences Party? And you know those conspiracy theories that depend on an intricate collaboration among a few thousand people, all of them sworn to silence? Whoever thought those up as obviously never tried to get three people to agree among themselves about anything. The day of the floor meetings, little alterations began to creep in to the plan for the masquerade dance.

You've probably worked on group efforts before. You know how it goes.

Hey, let's do the dance cross-dressing! The guys come as princesses, the girls as princes!

I know, let's all buy candy and then invite the kids from around campus to come trick-or-treating!

Let's have a Horror House! We could use the basement of the Student Center and have like a murder room and a witch room and—

How about a Fortune Teller? She could read palms or Tarot cards—

Let's set up a couple of study rooms as Ouija board rooms!

Let's play some fun silly games—spin the bottle, and that one where you hold an orange, no hands, beneath your chin and you have to—

Spin the bottle! Like we played when we were twelve!

That's the way the dance-and-party planning went during the floor meetings.

When the R.A.'s met again to launch the official party/dance planning, Mrs. Rickard presiding, a consensus gradually emerged. Nobody would mind a dollar and a half entry fee—that would gain admission to the masquerade party and dance, plus participation (if the attendees wanted) in the official costume contest. Heather made a brilliant suggestion that everyone immediately adopted: "Why don't we say a dollar and a half for someone coming stag, but two dollars for a couple? That would encourage—"

"I move that we pass that!" Nicole interrupted. It passed unanimously.

"We have some standard tickets," Mrs. Rickard said. "And the Student Government has a special printer that will allow us to add the name of the event. I'll take care of that. I have a stack of posters here, so let's divide them up and post them—hit every building on campus, one poster per public-area bulletin board, so lobbies and vending areas, but no classrooms. For the men's dorms, leave one poster per floor at the front desk and get the R.A. on duty to agree to put them up."

"We get to flirt with the guys!" Myra said, clapping.

"Keep it reasonable," Mrs. Rickard said. "Now, we'll have to limit attendance to no more than 1000 students, because of fire department rules, but that shouldn't be a problem. Most of the dances here top out between five hundred and eight hundred, but to be safe, let's print one thousand tickets. I can have them ready by tomorrow."

"How do we distribute them?" Luisa asked.

They talked about that and wound up deciding to keep a ledger at the front desk. Whichever R.A. was on duty—there were two non-student assistants who held down the desk during weekday class hours and on weekends, but the R.A.'s took evening duty from seven to eleven P.M. Monday through Friday—would take phone orders from callers, write the purchaser's name and number of tickets in the ledger, and then at the door of the party, someone would take payment and hand out the tickets. Or, if anyone wanted, they could walk in and buy tickets at the desk. The lobby and desk were open to anyone, boy or girl, so that would work.

Currently, Wanda's night on the desk had worked out to be, blah, Fridays. That would change in the next week, because the five R.A.'s went forward one day every couple of weeks, so nobody was stuck all term having duty on date night. Wanda's desk duty had begun on Wednesdays at the start of term, advanced to Thursdays, and then had become Fridays. On Monday—well, it would go to Mondays.

And that was why on Monday, October 16, Wanda sat at the dorm desk, working on some Accounting homework and answering the phone: "Dowling Hall, front desk, how may I help you?"

And sometimes it would be a pizza guy asking if he was supposed to drop off the order at the desk—he was—and sometimes it would be a parent whose daughter wasn't answering her room phone and would she please give the girl a note, call your mother, and so on. Every once in a while it would be a resident: "There's a funny smell in my room." And rarely, it would be some idiot joker: "Uh, hey, I need a date, can you transfer me to whichever girl's the easiest?"

Never say anything in that case. Just hang up.

However, on Monday night, right off the bat, Wanda got six calls for tickets at about ten-minute intervals. All of them sprang for the twofer deal—four girls, two boys—and Wanda wrote down the names and the dorm addresses of the students. If they wanted, she sent them instructions for the costume contest—they'd had a brochure printed, and all she had to do was write the student's name and dorm, with room number, in the white address square, fold, and drop the sheet into the campus mail tray.

At a little past eight, the calls trailed off. Wanda went back to her textbook and the difference between general and subsidiary accounts. It was not that easy, and she wrinkled her forehead in concentration.

In fact, her book took so much of her attention that she didn't notice the guy come in and approach the desk. He had been standing there—she thought—for a couple or three minutes before she glanced up. Tallish guy, slender but not willowy, rumpled brown hair, not bad-looking if you overlooked his somewhat large, pink nose, big brown eyes, mild smile. He wore a Ralph Lauren polo, dark blue with a white collar, under a rumpled blue chambray work shirt worn like a thin jacket, and what she could see of him from the waist down showed her a pair of acid-washed jeans.

"Yes, can I help you?" she asked.

"Dance tickets?" he asked "The poster said—"

"Oh, right," she said. "Do you want to get them at the door—"

"Could I just pick them up tonight?" he asked.

"We can do that." She opened the desk drawer. The roll of salmon-colored tickets and the flat green metal cash box was there. "How many?"

"Two," he said. "Me and—do I have to tell you the name of my date?"

Aha. Probably a freshman. "No, just bring your date and both tickets. That's two dollars, no tax. Here, take this—rules for the masquerade. Doors will open at seven. The tickets get you in, punch is free, but there's a charge for food concessions."

He gave her two singles, crisp and new. She tore off two tickets.

"Thanks," he said. "I'm sorry. Again."

Something in Wanda's memory went _click!_

Oh, yeah—the dweeb with the Frisbee. "It didn't hurt all that bad," she said.

"Still, I didn't mean to let it hit anybody. Uh. Will you be at the dance?"

"Sure," she said. "Our dorm's sponsoring it."

"Got a date?"

That made Wanda laugh out loud. "You're too young for me, kid."

The boy shrugged and grinned shyly. Damn it, he was kind of cute. "Well—" he said.

"Don't go yet, I need to write your name and dorm address in the book."

He tucked the tickets and the folded brochure into his shirt pocket while she opened the ledger. "OK, shoot."

"Alexander Mason Pines," he said. "Pines, like two of the trees. And everybody calls me Alex. I'm in Dudley 202."

"A-L-E-X," she said, printing. Her handwriting was small and neat, but to be on the safe side, she'd been printing the information. "And P-I-N-E-S, right?"

"Right. You're a business major," he said.

"None of _your_ business." He looked a little downcast, and with a tiny twinge of conscience, she said, "Well, yes. How'd you know?"

He nodded toward the desk. "Scharch and Llewellyn, _Accounting Fundamentals._ Dr. Trine is the only professor on campus who requires that in his classes. He's supposed to be a good teacher, but hard. Usually only majors take his classes."

"How did you—" Wanda made a guess: "You work in the bookstore!"

"Yeah, student assistant. Helps pay the bills. What's wrong with Wandelle? It's a striking name. Unusual."

"Why do you like Alex instead of Alexander?" she countered. "Maybe I don't think I'm a striking or unusual person."

"I don't know," he said. "I struck you. Or let you get struck. Sorry about—"

The phone rang and Wanda answered it. Two more tickets. She wrote the names and addresses down.

"I guess you're busy," Alex said. "Well—I'll see you at the dance, OK?"

"I can't keep you from looking," she said.

"Ouch. Come on. I mean, yeah, I'm a freshman, but I'm not that much younger than you are. If I come to the dance stag, would you at least consider dancing with me?"

"What if I want to dance with my boyfriend?"

"You don't have one."

"What makes you think that?"

"Your friend Nicole yelled to tell me your name and dorm. She wouldn't do that if you were, you know, going steady."

"How'd you know her name?" Wanda asked, wondering if this ordinary-looking guy was a stalker.

"You yelled back at her," he said. "She called out your name and dorm, and you yelled, 'Nicole!'"

Oh. Maybe not a stalker. "You're like a Sherlock Holmes, aren't you?" she asked.

He shook his head. "No. Just new in college and excited about it, but—a loner. Away from home for the first time. My roommate got busted for having weed and got sent home, so I'm all on my own in the dorm room, don't have friends here, and—I'm talking too much. I'm kinda lonely."

"What are you majoring in?"

"Computer science. You never answered me about maybe dancing with me. Just once?"

The phone rang. "OK, maybe," she said. "We'll see." She answered the phone, he waved, turned, and walked out into the night. "Dowling Hall front desk, may I help you? Yes, how many tickets?"

* * *

_2-Anybody There?_

At about the same time, upstairs in room 313, Becca Thebault was also all on her own. Melissa was over in the library, researching a paper. Becca, restless, went down the hall into the bathroom, turned out the light, and closed the door. Pretty dark. Just a little line of light under the door.

Too public, though. You couldn't lock the door. A girl might come in at any time to shower or to powder her nose. And technically, students weren't supposed to have candles in their rooms, let alone take them to the communal bathroom. Oh, well.

She went back to 313. There was a nearly full-length mirror mounted on the back of the door. And it was dark outside. Maybe—

She closed the blinds and drew the curtains. But even when she turned off the lights, the room had enough leakage to let a dim, grayish illumination in. She couldn't see details, couldn't read by it, but she could clearly see everything in the room.

Oh, well.

But let's experiment. Maybe we can do something about it.

Becca took her thick red-and-black Brandon College blanket from the closet shelf. It was new, because she'd bought it early in the term, but the nights had been so warm she hadn't needed it. She stood on a desk chair and tucked the end of the blanket around the curtain rod. Adjusted the hang. Got down and turned off the lights again.

Better. There was still light seeping in from the hallway. She stuffed towels against the bottom of the door and tried again. Pretty dark. Not completely, but pretty dark.

She turned on the light, lit the candle, flicked the light back off. With the candle on the desk, she stood about three feet back from the mirror and gazed at her reflection. The candle and desk were behind her. She could see Melissa's SNKYN poster—not brightly enough so she could make out the faces of Justis, Kris, Jack, Clanzy, and B.N., the guys in the group, but she could see them in their shot-from-below-eye-level crossed-arms pose.

They were a new group. Becca couldn't decide if she liked their stuff or not, but Mel was a definite fan. One of her short-term ambitions was to get away to San Francisco for their February tour appearance there. Whatever.

Taking a deep breath, Becca began to repeat, "Bloody Mary," over and over.

Ten times. Twelve. Thirteen.

And she stared until her eyes watered.

No blood-smeared hag appeared.

The boys in the poster looked like they were moving a little, but Becca decided that her eyes were just tired.

"Shoot," she grumbled. She turned on the lights and blew out the candle. "I guess Bloody Mary's not home, huh?" she asked the room.

For no reason at all, the boy-band poster peeled loose and fell off the wall.

* * *


	5. Reversals

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

**5: Reversals**

* * *

_1-You Have to Eat_

Mrs. Rickard checked in with Wanda two weeks before the scheduled Halloween party, and she was complimentary when she saw the paperwork Wanda had already accumulated. “You’re very organized!” she said.

“Thanks,” Wanda said with a tired smile. “I guess I’ve always been so busy with so many things at the same time that I’ve had to learn to be.”

“Why two DJs?” Mrs. Rickard asked as she glanced through the budget page.

“Well—the first one, Josh Jackson, is the best one, but I asked around, and people say he’s sometimes not all that reliable, so we decided to take the second one on our list, Eric Chester, too. They can spell each other at the end of every hour and each one can take some time to party. But if Josh is late or forgets to show up something, then we’ve got a back-up.”

“That makes sense,” Mrs. Rickard said. “And it won’t break the budget. How are ticket sales?”

“We had a big rush the first week, but it’s starting to level off. So far, we’ve sold about, let me see . . . as of last night, 740. That’s 184 singles and 278 couples. Sales are a little under fourteen hundred dollars, but most of that’s going to be at the door. We’ve taken in about three hundred and twenty in cash.”

“Very good numbers. We should more than cover our costs with that much, but we’d better plan for a full thousand attendees, then. I’ll call Jeanine at Student Services. She’s got a good handle on how much punch we’ll need and how much food the SGA will want to provide. Good work. What are the plans for the masquerade?”

“Well, after we wrestled with it, we decided not to set a theme. We did hand out the dress codes—nothing too revealing, nothing that hinders movement, no two-person costumes, like horses or centaurs and so on. Comfort and safety, you know. We’ll have some Security guys at the entrance, and they’ll help us screen any inappropriate costumes. Oh—by the way, the HK’s and Tri-Delts called and told Myra they were planning a party the same night and objected to us—”

“Yes, I received the note of complaint through the SGA, and I’ve already taken care of that,” Mrs. Rickard said. “I’d registered our dance with the SGA before the HK’s even approached them. Anyway, that’s just a Greek mixer, and they’re free to use the practice gym, so their party is private between the two organizations and won’t affect most of the students.”

She didn’t add anything about the HK’s, not technically a Greek fraternity, but a social organization open mostly to jocks and as a group it had an iffy reputation. The other girls had told Wanda the guys individually were all right, but as a group they had a very casual attitude toward rules. “As it is,” Nicole told Wanda, “around ten PM, somebody’s bound to spike the punch. If the HK’s came, that’s the _first_ thing they’d do, and they might not even use vodka. With them, it could be acid.”

All in all, let the Greeks be Greeks and the other students have some silly fun. Anyway, Wanda’s review was satisfactory. When Wanda left Mrs. Rickard’s apartment and walked down to the lobby, carrying a Snoopy tote bag with all the agreements and receipts and so on, she was surprised to see Alex sitting in one of the chairs. “Hi,” he said, springing up and shifting from foot to foot, as though fighting the urge to flee. He was wearing blue chinos, a black tee-shirt, and over that an orange-and-yellow plaid cotton shirt. He gestured at her Snoopy bag. “Need some help?”

She shook her head, frowning at him. “No, I just have to take this up to my room. What are you doing here?”

He grinned, shyly. He wasn’t bad looking, especially when he was smiling, but damn, he was young. Lightly, he said, “Oh, I’m just here to make a pest of myself. No, really, I just wanted to see you again. It’s nearly noon. Have you got plans for lunch?”

She frowned a warning at him. “No.”

He tilted his head to the side. “Don’t be mad. I’m not really hitting on you. It’s all good. Anyway, you have to eat, and so do I. Come with? We can go wherever you want.”

“Listen carefully. I am not interested in dating you,” she said firmly.

He shrugged. With his hands in his pockets and his elbows bent and his head tilted shyly forward, he looked oddly appealing—not in a hot way, but more like a cuddly puppy unsure of his welcome. “That’s OK. Just lunch, not a date. We can go Dutch if you want. It’s Saturday, you don’t have any tests or anything to study for, you don’t have any papers due—”

“How would you know that?”

He gave her a sly smile. “Computer science major, remember? Every student’s schedule is posted on the Academics web page. All your classes have syllabi posted online. I checked the calendars.”

She made a face. True, the sheer organization that his effort must have taken sort of impressed her, but she said, “That’s creepy.”

“Yeah, sorry, but I have no social skills,” he agreed. “I won’t do it again. Don’t let it freak you. Come on. It’s just having lunch together. I’m mostly harmless.”

“You should have called—”

“You’d have turned me down,” he said flatly, and she knew that he knew that she really would have, if he’d phoned first. Quietly, he explained, “Word, I don’t know how to chat up a girl. No practice. I’ve always been too shy. I won’t hit on you and I won’t make you uncomfortable, I promise. Let’s just have lunch, that’s all. Or tell me to burn off, and I’m gone. Up to you.”

Wanda bit back a sarcastic response. He didn’t _seem_ to be conning her. His confession of loneliness and awkwardness sounded sincere. If only he wasn’t so young—but he was cute, in a dorky kind of way. She sighed theatrically. “How about Tico’s Taqueria?”

He brightened up at that. “On Cuarenta? That’s fine with me. Mind walking?”

Well, that was bogus. But it made her smile. “You don’t even have a car.”

Ruefully, Alex admitted, “Wish I did, but no, I don’t. I’m saving up, and my dad says he’ll help me buy one next year if I bring in an A average. Come on, Tico’s is only a twenty-minute walk. We won’t book it, just stroll. It’s a nice day for a walk.”

Wanda knew it was more like a fifteen-minute walk—she and some of her friends had made the trek before. “All right, but you do realize it’s not a date.”

He immediately looked so relieved that she almost laughed as she suddenly understood how scared he had been. He said, “Definitely not a date. Just a couple of friends having—”

With mock severity, she said, “We’re not really friends.”

“Duh, dumb me. OK, couple of students just having a meal together.”

“I do have to eat,” she conceded. “OK. Give me about fifteen minutes to put this stuff away and change.”

Testing him, she deliberately let twenty minutes go by. She came down, wearing orange denim wide-leg shorts, a white mock turtleneck, and over that a heavy yellow cotton shirt, along with white loafers. “Ready?” she asked as Alex jumped up from his chair again.

“Let’s roll. I like your outfit.”

“Wouldn’t fit you.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. But our colors kind of match, see? You probably didn’t notice.”

She had to laugh at him. “You really are a dork, aren’t you?”

“Guess so,” he said cheerfully. “Oh, just so I know—is it OK if I pay for lunch?”

“Still not a date?”

“Hand to God,” he said. “Just two students having lunch.”

“OK, then.” Grudgingly, she said, “It really wasn’t in my budget. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

It was a good day for a walk—sunny, mild October weather, temperature in the seventies, blue sky overhead. College Street led about a block to Cuarenta, where they turned left and walked down a wide sidewalk shaded by overhanging white-barked gum trees, the sparse canopy dappling their path with patches of sun and shade. “Smells nice here,” Wanda said. “Very lemony.”

“That’s the trees,” Alex told her. “Lemon-scented gums. The first ones were imported from Australia.”

“Mm-hmm.”

As they left the campus behind, they joined other strollers out for a walk, students and townies. At the corner of Cuarenta and Fifth, they saw that the restaurant was busy, but not overcrowded. Off to the side, only about half of the twelve terrace tables were occupied.

Inside, where the décor was bright-colored Tex-Mex tacky, a young woman in a wide-collared white shirt, black jeans, and a knee-length red apron jangled her big silver hoop earrings and asked, “Outside or inside?”

“Inside,” Wanda said.

“Table of booth?”

Wanda looked at Alex. He shrugged.

“Booth,” she said.

So they sat in one of the booths-for-two, in a corner beneath a huge painting of four cartoony mariachi musicians in silver-spangled blue suits and big sombreros. The sound system played _norteño_ music, Mexican but emphasizing an accordion and sounding oddly like polkas. It was lively and not too loud.

They ordered sodas, then two taco samplers, one veggie featuring avocado, one chicken, and one beef. The plates came with rice and beans. The waitress didn’t write anything down, but took their menus and said, “Five minutes!”

“Have you eaten here before?” Wanda asked Alex.

“No. This is the first time I’ve eaten a meal off campus, in fact, but I’ve heard about this place. I like Mexican food.”

Wanda picked up one of three condiment bottles. “OK, this sauce here is very hot—habanero. This is the hot-but-not-lethal, and this is the medium.”

“Thanks,” he said. He tried a few drops of the habanero on a corn chip. “Whoo! Little too much for me. I’ll settle for the merely hot. Hey, tell me how the plans for the dance are coming along.”

OK, so true, he was young for her, but she had to admit he was an attentive listener. Not much of a talker. So many times guys were full of themselves and their own interests, sports, cars, the best beer for the buck, whatever. Alex was different. As they chatted, Wanda actually had to pry a little.

“No, I’m an only child,” he said. “You?” He munched a taco as he listened to her response.

“I’ve got kind of a distant older brother. By the time I was born, he had his own friends, so he was more like a long-term visitor than a brother. So what does your dad do?”

“Owns a chain of electronics stores, but he’s thinking of selling out and retiring. His health is kind of iffy.”

“I’m sorry.”

“One of those things,” he said. They finished their taco samplers at the same moment “Thanks for recommending this place. That was good.”

“I liked mine, too. Thanks for the lunch.”

Alex waved at the waitress, who nodded and held up a finger—one minute, and I‘ll be with you. He asked Wanda, “Room for sopapillas?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Split an order?”

He looked so damn appealing. Like a puppy again, but one shyly begging for a treat. So she gave in: “Maybe. OK.”

And so it went. He walked her back, said goodbye at the dorm door, putting no moves on her, then turned and walked two steps before stopping for a last word. “OK maybe to have one dance with you?”

“I suppose,” she said, smiling.

His grin was wide and—pleased. Not a smirk, not a grin of triumph, but an expression that said, _That makes me so happy!_ Aloud, he said, “Cool. Do this again some time?”

It had been fun. And he was a mild kind of quiet guy, one of those who never got a break. And she knew how that felt herself. She said, “Mm. All right. But nothing serious.”

“Nothing serious,” he agreed.

He went on his way, and when Wanda turned around, Nicole was at her shoulder. “Ooh, girl! You finally went on a date!”

“Did not,” she said. “Just lunch. And he’s a freshman, so it’s like ridiculous.”

“You could do worse. One of those intense intellectual types, mm. I sure wouldn’t kick him out of bed.”

“I,” said Wanda, “wouldn’t let him into it!”

* * *

_2-Hazardous Combinations_

Surprising danger lurks in apparently harmless chemicals.

Two common products, probably found in every home in America, can, if combined, produce a deadly gas, a corrosive yellow-green vapor that in World War I was used as a chemical-warfare agent. Each product, on its own, is completely innocent, even useful. Together, they’re fatal.

The same principle applies to people. Sometimes the trouble comes not from the individual, but from the combination of two or more. Like a harmless cleaning product and a useful kitchen condiment, if two people of the right—or maybe wrong—temperaments combine, the result can be fatal, not necessarily for them. Others can be affected, too. In a dangerous way.

Mind, there’s nothing malicious about this. No _same-thing-we-do-every-night: Try-to-take-over-the-world_ malignity. Two basically well-meaning people can just be wrong for each other, can be a deadly couple, or create a terrifying friendship without meaning to.

Rebecca Thebalt and Melissa Alewine just missed being such a dangerous combination of personalities. They came close—but when push met shove, Mel was just too timid to explore the Bloody Mary or Ouija notions with Becca. Becca couldn’t talk her into looking in the mirror and summoning the gory visage of the ghost or demon or whatever Bloody Mary was supposed to be. And Mel felt creeped out by the Ouija board experiment and refused to fool around with it again.

Becca, though—well, she was a little bit nervous, but not really scared. And she was curious as a cat with a death wish. Her friends in high school had got some results from their home-made talking boards. Though her experiment with Mel had failed, somehow that planchette had moved from GOODBYE to NO. Becca knew that she hadn’t moved it—and Mel swore that she hadn’t done it, either. But something—something had.

And also she wondered about the stupid poster. That dumb poster.

It would not stay up.

When it had first fallen, Becca had immediately put it back into place. It wasn’t framed, and Mel hadn’t taped it to begin with—you weren’t supposed to use anything that woud scar or mar the dorm-room wall. Mell had used some kind of putty instead, blobs of it along the top edge, a couple more in the bottom corners to make it stay flat on the wall. The little dots of peel-off putty were still on the wall. The poster had somehow peeled loose from them.

Becca had pressed it back into place the night she’d tried the Bloody Mary bit. It stayed up until Mel got back from the library.

She came in, put her books on the desk—

And with a papery whisper, the poster had slipped to the floor. “Oh, hell,” Melissa muttered. She picked the poster up, stood on a chair, and felt the six blobs of putty that ran in a row where the top edge of the poster should have been. “That’s funny. These are still real sticky.”

“Maybe you should pull them off and knead them,” Becca said.

Mel laid the poster down on her bed and pulled the little pieces of sticky putty off the wall, even the two that held the bottom corners down. She smushed them together into a wad about the size of a golf ball, then squeezed and pulled it for a few minutes.

“Stickier now. This should do it,” she said, pinching off small pieces. They had come off the wall cleanly, so she eyeballed a straight line as she stuck them back up. “Becca, hand me my poster, please.”

Becca did, Mel pressed the poster against the blobs, they held, and for good measure, she picked up her Spanish textbook and flat-hammered the poster down, smoothing and flattening it. “That’s got it,” she had said.

The girls went to bed. Sometime during the night, the poster slipped down again.

Cursing just a little, and mildly, Mel rolled the poster up, carefully, and put it on her closet shelf.

After class that day, she bought some easy-release double-sided tape at the bookstore. That evening she had put the poster on the wall again with the tape.

The next morning it was on the floor again.

Before even showering, Mel rolled up and stored the poster again. She touched the wall—and yelped. “Becca! Come and feel!”

The wall was so cold it almost burned their palms. Yet when they held their hands even half an inch away, everything was normal. And the adjoining walls were merely cool, like normal drywall. “What the hell is wrong with this one wall?” Mel asked.

“Maybe inside there’s an air-conditioning duct or something?”

They called Maintenance. That afternoon a guy came and couldn’t find anything wrong. The opposite side of the wall, in room 311, was normal. Their 313 side showed up black on an infrared reader. Very cold for no reason..

The official conclusion was “beats the heck out of us.”

Anyway, Mel moved the poster to the adjoining wall, over the head of her bed, and it stuck there. The side wall never seemed to warm back up, but it didn’t chill the room, and there matters rested.

And then, as the girls were setting about their plans for the Halloween door-decoration contest, Becca met another girl, one she knew only by sight. They ran into each other in the bookstore, buying poster board and paint.

“Aren’t you from Dowling?” Becca asked the jittery-looking brunette. She looked unnaturally pale—her skin tone was sort of a diluted olive, but her brown eyes had purple circles beneath them, and her expression made her look anxious.

“Yeah,” the girl said, not smiling. “I’m on your floor. Room 302. You’re Rebecca, right?”

“That’s me. I’ve seen you around—you weren’t at the floor meetings, though, were you?”

“I’ve been kind of sick,” the other girl said.

“Sorry. I’m in 313. Call me Becca. Becca Thebalt,” she said.

“Hi, Becca,” the other girl said. “My name is Selene Maggio.”

And the innocent chemicals began to mix.


	6. Darkness is the Problem

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**6: Darkness is the Problem**

_1-Pictures in the Night_

Little backstory here. Alex Pines's roommate always had been, to put it baldly, a moron. He wasn't a talker, and in the short time they'd roomed together, Alex hadn't learned anything much about him, except he was, quote, "a hot-shit halfback" in high school.

In fact, Chuck Wahling had coasted through high school because he had a gift for running fast and more often than not catching a ball. He had been a big man on a small campus, and by the time he was a senior, old Chuckie had been a little too fond of beer and especially of pot. When he became a freshman at Brandon, and tentatively a member of the football squad (halfback presumptive, though he had yet to play in a game), he'd assumed that what had worked for him in high school would continue to work in college.

So once he'd moved into the dorm, he devoted his time to endless rounds of Monkey Pong on his GameGuy, putting away six-packs of brew, the only things in the compact fridge on the floor beside his bed, and on the sly, sneaking tokes on wacky ciggies, though the dorm was a smoking-restricted one. On the morning of the sixth day of class, Alex had headed out and looked at Chuckie, sprawled in bed, intent on his game console, thumbs busy. "Hey," Alex had called, "don't you have a nine o'clock?" At the moment it was 8:45, and Chuckie was in nothing but underwear.

"Screw it," Chuckie said without even looking up from his game.

As it turned out, that was the last time Alex saw his roommate. That same afternoon a Campus Security guy was waiting for Alex when he showed up at the dorm. "Alexander Pines? Come with us."

That was at four PM. Alex went through three rounds of questioning—city police, campus police, and a dean who told Alex he'd have to go through the same routine the next day with the Student Disciplinary Committee. After all that, an exhausted and nervous Alex didn't get back to the dorm until close to midnight, and he had to ring for the night-desk man to come and let him in.

He had to miss his first class to attend the disciplinary committee meeting, which thankfully ran for only about forty minutes, since the committee members had summaries of his campus-cop session the night before. After that, it took another couple of days for the college authorities to decide, and at last Alex went limp with relief when he received a registered letter telling him no charges would be made and that he would continue as a student in good standing.

What he also didn't know was that the disciplinary council members, after having interviewed him for more time than they actually needed, because they'd already made up their minds, began to laugh out loud five seconds after Alex had left the room.

They laughed because they realized Alex, and this was incredible, did not even know what marijuana looked or smelled like. "King of the dweebs," one of the guys said between chuckles.

"Come on," one of the girls on the council said. "He's kind of dumb and innocent, that's all. He's like a little kid. I believe him."

"Oh, we all believe him," the chairman said. "And the campus cops know where Wahling got his grass, and it ain't from Mr. Pines."

"Poor guy. He was so scared. I wonder if he's ever even tasted a beer?" the first girl said.

"Communion wine, maybe. I'll bet he's an altar boy!" another girl said.

"I think Pines is a Jewish name, actually," said the quietest boy on the council. His name was Greenbaum, so he ought to know.

"Don't they have altar boys?" asked the second girl, sounding surprised.

At least they laughed at her this time, not at Alex.

The Saturday after that, Mr. Wahling came to campus to collect his son's belongings. Feeling apologetic even though he had nothing to be sorry for, Alex stood awkwardly watching Mr. Wahling as he held up two textbooks. "These my son's?" he asked in a brusque, annoyed voice.

Fighting back the sense that he was both useless and foolish, Alex said, "Yes, sir. Those and the others on his shelf there."

"These two books are still shrink-wrapped," Mr. Wahling said. "Wasn't he even going to class?"

"I don't know," Alex said. When Mr. Wahling, a burly guy with a short haircut, just stood and glowered at him, he squirmed. "I never saw him leave for class," he added lamely.

Wahling had brought in an empty oversized suitcase, and he tossed Chuckie's clothes in, clean and dirty alike, gathering shirts and jackets off closet hangers and scooping the laundry pile off the floor. When he'd reaped closet and floor, he began to empty Chuckie's bureau—Alex noticed he was efficient, starting with the bottom drawer and then going upward.

Wahling grunted as he took three glossy nudie magazines out from the next-to-top drawer and tossed them on Alex's desk. "I'm not taking these home. Yours if you want 'em, if not, toss 'em." Then he emptied the top drawer—but then reached inside, fumbling with something. "Aw, damn it!" he said. "He promised us." He pulled out a plastic baggie nearly full of green stuff. "Kid—what's your name again?"

"Uh, Alex Pines."

"Alex, call Campus Security. Wait, first, you got any dope?"

Alex blinked. "I—uh, what?"

"Weed," the guy said impatiently. "Are you holding?"

"You mean marijuana?" Alex asked. "Is—that marijuana?"

The angry glare softened. "You kidding me, son?"

Alex shook his head. "I just never saw any, I guess. No, I don't even have aspirin."

Wahling sighed. "Why couldn't my son be like you? Campus cops. Call 'em."

Alex did, and when they arrived, Mr. Wahling told them he had found the baggie in his son's bureau drawer. "It was taped to the very back," he said.

And the city police came and confiscated the baggie, and they had Alex and Mr. Wahling leave for most of an hour while they ransacked the room—Alex's belongings too. They went down to the lobby and sat, Mr. Wahling looking frustrated and sad. "He keeps blowing his chances," he told Alex, shaking his head.

"I didn't get to know him well," Alex said.

"You didn't miss much," Mr. Wahling said sourly. "We did our best with him. Now he's got to go to court because of the amount. When they arrested him, he was holding less than an ounce, not a big deal. Now, I don't know. Looks like he's out of college for good. Did Chuck tell you about us? His dad and mom?"

"No, sir. We didn't talk much."

"Figures. He talks big to girls and jocks, mouths off to teachers and cops. He talks normal to nobody else. Back home in Santa Teresa, I'm a policeman on the city force. His mom's a youth counselor at a group home. You'd think between the two of us we could raise a decent kid." Despite his rough appearance, Wahling looked miserable.

Alex didn't know what to say, and so he'd kept quiet. After an hour the police told them their search had turned up nothing else. Alex could go back to the room, and Mr. Wahling could take Chuckie's things home. Alex helped him carry a box of odds and ends, books, toiletries and such, to his car and wished him luck.

With Chuckie gone, Alex learned he'd probably get another roommate in January, but for the time being he was on his own. Even though Chuckie hadn't done much more than play games and grunt, Alex found himself a little lonely.

He met some of the other guys on the floor but just like in high school, he didn't fit in. He was the circle in a dorm full of angular Tetris polygons. He lingered on the fringes of a few late-night bull sessions, but the raucous sex jokes and off-color insults depressed him.

He played three or four games of chess in the common room, but he was pretty good, and once he had beaten another guy two or three times, the guy didn't want to play him again. Not that he was a gloater, but Alex's studious expression and silence were somehow off-putting. It got harder to find opponents.

He wasn't a drinker. Beer was another major topic of conversation among the other guys. Overhearing the conversations in the halls, Alex had made the discovery that the sentence, "Man, I was so damn drunk last night" could serve as a morning greeting.

Though he enjoyed his classes and felt he was learning a lot, he realized he wasn't living up to a promise he'd made to himself the day his mom and dad had driven him to college: _I will get to know people. I will make friends._

He did try. One afternoon he joined an impromptu Frisbee game and made a couple of good catches and tosses, and then he missed what should have been an easy one, and the plastic disk clocked a girl on the back of her head, and the guy who'd thrown it had said, "Yes! Two points!"

And the girl turned around, angry, but—Alex thought—incredibly pretty. He'd stumbled through an apology, she'd been abrupt with him, but the girl with her had yelled out the first girl's name—Wandelle Mabel Bailey, a really unusual one, which oddly endeared her to him. He'd dropped out of the Frisbee game and, having no paper handy, took out a ballpoint pen and on the palm of his right hand—he was a lefty—Alex wrote Wandell Mable Bailey, Dowling." He learned the correct spelling of her name only later.

Holding his hand out from his side so the ink wouldn't smear, he'd gone back to his solo room and copied out the name in his schedule book. Then he washed off the ink and on his computer—not a name-brand machine, he had built it from scratch—he waited for the modem to squeal, chatter, and connect, then logged into the online student information page. Out of Brandon's nearly 6,000 students, 14 were Baileys, and he found Wandelle—ah, that was how it was spelled—as number 14. They went in alphabetical order.

Then it became a matter of snooping.

Though Alex himself didn't find it creepy—he was a researcher, and this was research—he vaguely thought that she, Wandelle, or Wanda as the other girl had called out, might find his looking up her class information disturbing. But that was all right, he thought. _I'll never talk to her again, anyhow._

Then a couple of days later, as though it were fate, as he walked into the dining hall, he noticed the 8 ½ x 11-inch poster on the bulletin board by the entrance: MASKED BALL FOR HALLOWEEN! He ordinarily would have passed it by—he didn't have a girlfriend, barely knew how to dance. However, at the bottom, he read the line _Sponsored by the Dowling Hall Resident Assistants and the Student Government Association._

And he knew from his research that Wanda Bailey was one of the Dowling RA's. It took the rest of that day and the following night to make up his mind, but he went to Dowling dorm to do what the poster recommended—GET YOUR TICKETS NOW! And golly, Wanda herself was at the desk, and—

Well, that was in the past. On that particular Saturday, she had gone on the not-a-date-lunch with him. He hadn't goofed up too badly. Although he didn't want to make too much of it, he had an odd feeling.

By the time he got back to his room that afternoon, he was, he supposed, falling in—um—in like with the girl.

And somehow that made him smile like an idiot.

The night following the lunch day, he somehow had a hard time getting to sleep. He lay back on his bed, staring up at the ceiling—barely even visible in the small leak of light from his bedside clock radio face—and imagined it full of pictures of Miss Bailey.

_Man, I am such a loser! She's just kind of sarcastic and kind of nice, but here I am lying awake in bed, thinking of her. Seeing visions of her in the dark._

But he knew the visions were purely imaginary.

Fortunately, before he could feel sorry for himself, he finally fell asleep.

* * *

_2-Looking for Night_

Though Melissa was really into the door decorating bit—she and Becca had decided on a haunted-castle kind of look for their door, and they were busy painting and partly bas-relief sculpting it—Becca was less thrilled. "I'm more of a concept person than an artisan," she said. "I work more with my head than my hands."

So Becca had helped cover the exterior of the door with poster board, but Mel had used tempera to paint a deep blue night sky, shading down to pure black at the bottom, as the backdrop. At the Buck-and-Under store in town, Mel had bought a small round snack bowl, translucent plastic. She had also bought a tiny little light socket, the right size for a flashlight bulb, and some wire from a hobby shop.

She put a circle of aluminum foil on the door, high up, taped the light socket to that, led the two black wires up, over the top of the door, and on the back side of the door, she'd fastened the wires to a penlight barrel. When she clicked the penlight on, the light worked, so she then used tape to fasten the dome over the foil circle. Turn out the hall lights, turn on the flashlight bulb, and voila! A full moon.

She layered some papier-mâché strips and painted them black to represent a craggy mountain, then used curved pieces of painted poster board to create the haunted castle. Strips of cotton, darkened with gray tempera, made clouds. Three-dimensional bats seemed to soar, attached to the door by being glued to little cubes of foamed plastic, the cubes then glued to the door background. It was shaping up.

It already looked much better than 311's door, which was a badly-made portrait of a squatty witch, her green face sneering at the passing world. You could tell that Mel had put a lot of effort into painting and sculpting the door to 313.

And Becca—had helped tape up the poster-board background. That was something.

But Becca and her new friend from the other end of the hall, Selene, helped mostly by staying out of the way. While Melissa was busy being artistic, Selene and Becca were talking about where to find a really dark place.

"Trouble is," Becca said, "we don't have a room that's really dark enough. We need one that doesn't have like a window at all. And a good-sized mirror. A big walk-in closet, or a bathroom."

"The bathrooms in Purdy Hall would do," Selene said. They were sitting on the bed in Selene's room, having tried and failed to make the place dark enough for Bloody Mary summoning purposes.

"Yeah, but I don't know anybody over there well enough to ask. There's the public restroom down off the lobby—there's a little anteroom, so if the light there was out and the one in the bathroom was out, too, it might be dark enough."

Selene thought about that. "We couldn't lock it. Maybe we could put up an _Out of Order_ sign?"

"I guess. But if we got really scared, we'd give ourselves away. Unless maybe we went at midnight or something."

"No, there's a night guard on duty from midnight to eight," Selene said. "She'd catch us and send us back up to our rooms."

"We'll just have to think up something," Becca said.

"Hey," Selene asked all of a suddenly, "The RA rooms—don't they have private baths?"

"No. Just the hall director has that."

"I know where we could go," Selene said. "But we'd have to do it the night of the dance."

"Where?" Becca asked.

"OK, the supply storage room? The one behind the snack bar?"

"In the Student Center, right," Becca said. "I know where the storage room is. What about it?"

"It has this tiny little toilet just off it in the back. Nobody uses it. It's unisex, you know. Just a toilet and a sink, but it does have a pretty big mirror."

"How do you even know that?"

Selene looked sour. "Because Rand used to take me into there and we kissed and made out. Like I said, it's out of the way, and nobody ever uses it. Rand works in the snack bar, so he knew about it."

"Sorry about him."

"He's a butthole," Selene said. "He was the one who wanted to go steady, and then he took Jennifer Ennis to the La Rita Museum of Modern Art, when he knew I wanted him to take me there. Then he lied to me about it."

Becca knew her well enough by then to steer Selene away from a self-pity party. "It doesn't stink, does it?"

"What? Oh, the bathroom? No, like cleanser, you know, a little. It's not nasty, but, I don't know, it's really dark. Especially with the storage-room light off. I think the bathroom door locks from the inside, but the storage room's always locked. Only Rand showed me how you can open it without a key. There's this one place where if you have a heavy paper clip and unbend it but leave a hook at the end, you can slip the lock. It's easy. I watched Rand do it."

"OK," Becca said. "When we go over to decorate the main room, can we slip away long enough to check and see if we can get into this place?"

"Sure," Selene said. "I'll find a big enough clip to use, and we'll try to pick the lock of the storage room. If we can do that, we can . . . let's see. One of us will turn on the light and stay by the switch. The other one will go back to the bathroom—it won't be locked—and turn on the bathroom light. Then the first one can turn off the storage room light and have the light from the bathroom to get there. And when we're both in the bathroom, we'll turn off the light there."

"And see how dark it is," agreed Becca. For some insane reason, her heart was beating fast.

* * *


	7. Experiments

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**7: Experiments**

_1-Details, Details_

"We went to lunch, we had tacos, end of story," Wanda said impatiently. "That's it. Just lunch. Nothing else." She was putting the finishing touches on her own dorm-room door. The RA's weren't eligible for the prizes, but they had to be good examples for the other girls. She had helped Nicole with her door project—a sexy-looking vampire guy, as if he had opened the door, smiling wickedly and beckoning the passing girls inside—and now Nicole was returning the favor.

"Yeah, and how was he?" Nicole asked. "Interesting?"

"Not very," Wanda said. Let's face it, she had very little in the way of artistic talent, and she lacked true inspiration. At the moment, the door had a background of black paper, and she was pasting up a variety of orange Jack O'Lanterns with crinkly accordion-fold arms and legs, posed as if they were dancing. Cut-out musical notes were pasted around them, in case the viewer didn't catch on, and she had already stenciled the colorful letters ready for clipping and pasting: PUMP IT UP! MASQUERADE DANCE.

As Nicole had observed, it looked more like an ad for pumpkins than a scary door, but whatever.

"Did he come on to you?" Nicole prodded, giggling.

"We. Had. Lunch. Talked about our majors. I told him he's too young for me. Jeeze Louise, he's a freshman, Nicole!"

"What's his major?" Nicole asked.

"Computer science, something like that. It doesn't matter."

"Good field," Nicole said. "My dad's made a lot of money, investing in computer stuff. And he says the internet's gonna be the big thing."

"I don't think Alex Pines is in it for the money," Wanda said, stepping back to see if she'd left enough room to make the caption just one line. She had. "He's a computer geek, that's all. He'll probably wind up as a repairman."

"Does he have money?"

Wanda shrugged. "His dad owns some electronics store or some deal, but no, I don't think so. He doesn't have a car. We walked to Tico's—"

"Ooh, a romantic walk!"

"Forget it," Wanda said. "My point was, Alex doesn't have a car. I don't think he's got a ton of money. Even if he did, it wouldn't matter—"

"Money doesn't matter. Must be True Love!" Nicole said in a goofy voice.

"Not!" Wanda said. "It was lunch, not a date. We both agreed it wasn't a date. And the money doesn't matter, because we're not going out again, not even to lunch. I told him—"

"Who paid for the tacos?" Nicole asked.

Wanda, just about to paste the second "P" of "PUMP" up on the door, gave her an irritated side-eye glance. "He did, OK? But that doesn't matter. Just kind of, I don't know, saving his self-esteem, OK?"

Nicole handed her the letters for "IT UP." She said, "Why did you even agree to go with him, then?"

"It was lunch time, I was hungry, he agreed it wouldn't be a date, I thought I could clear the air about him being interested in me, that's all. After he bought his tickets—"

"You sold him tickets to the dance!" Nicole said, laughing. "You scheming bee-yotch!"

"Don't say that!" Wanda snapped. "We're supposed to report girls using abusive—"

"I'm kidding!" Nicole said. "But, man, just 'cause he thought he had a chance with you, you talked him into buying a ticket for the—"

"It wasn't like that. Shit!" Wanda, half-distracted, had just pasted "PU" on the door. The glue was still tacky, so she peeled off and reversed the letters. "He came to the desk on Monday when I had duty and wanted to buy two tickets—"

"Two! Who's he bringing?"

"How the fudge should I know?" Wanda asked, her face hot now with exasperation. "He didn't say and I didn't ask!"

"I'll bet he's coming stag," Nicole said, narrowing her eyes. "I'll bet he plans on dancing with you!"

"He's going to be disappointed," Wanda said. "I'll volunteer to help with the concessions sales."

"You don't plan to dance?" Nicole asked.

"Not interested."

"But if a hunky guy shows up and asks you—"

"I'll be busy."

"Come on, shifts at the table are only an hour so everybody can enjoy the party. When you get off from your shift—"

In a tone of quiet anger, Wanda said, "I told Alex I'd dance with him for one dance, OK? Drop it, and just let me finish this. I don't want to talk about it."

"All right, all right," Nicole said, sounding apologetic. "I just wanted a few details."

* * *

_2-Moves_

One thing about not having a roommate, doing embarrassing things in private wouldn't attract derision or bullying. Alex put on a mix tape and practiced.

It wasn't the same. He didn't know if he was doing it right. He watched the music-TV shows on the tiny portable set he'd bought used and that, in his dorm room, brought in barely acceptable video and sound. On the screen, dancers looked like hamsters dressed in human clothes. It was difficult to be sure of the dance patterns, but he tried.

At lunch he asked one of the guys from his dorm floor, Artie McNair, "How'd you learn do dance?"

"My older sister taught me," Artie said. "How did you?"

"I never have," Alex admitted. "I just . . . didn't have a girl in high school, so I didn't go to dances."

"Oh? You going to the Halloween dance, right?" Artie asked, laughing.

"Got a ticket, but I wouldn't have the confidence to ask a girl. I don't know—"

"Delia," Artie said immediately.

"I . . . don't get it," Alex said.

"Delia Jenning," Artie said. "Porter Hall. She'll give you a dance lesson for ten dollars. If she's got a time open. Lot of guys are trying to learn how to dance."

Artie didn't have contact information, but that was easy enough to find. That evening after dinner, Alex called her room number, got her roommate, was handed off to Delia, and discovered he didn't know how to start. "Uh, hi, this is Alex Pines. You, uh, you don't know me—"

"Dance lesson?" she asked.

"Right," Alex said. "I heard that you—"

"Eight o'clock," she said. "Rec room of my dorm. There'll be two or maybe three other guys, I'll go over five different dances, we'll practice. Ten dollars for the hour, is that OK?"

"That sounds fine," Alex said.

"You know where the rec room is?"

"No, but—"

"Go to the front desk, tell the girl on duty you're here for the lessons, she'll point you. Wear comfortable shoes, no need to dress up or anything. Bring the cash."

"Thanks," Alex said.

Delia turned out to be a lanky, tall girl, not very pretty, but not homely, either. Somewhere in the plain-to-slightly attractive zone. Alex showed up about ten minutes early. She was setting up a boom box at the far end of the room, past two Ping-Pong tables that weren't in use.

"You here for dance?" she asked him.

He nodded. "I'm Alex Pines—"

"Ten dollars, up front."

He handed her a ten. "I'm not very good at dancing," he said. "I've just watched mostly and only danced once or—"

"No sweat," she said, tucking the money inside her loose blouse and probably inside her bra. "OK, I'm Delia Jenning, Andy, and—"

"Alex," he corrected.

She gave him a wry little smile. "Sorry, man. Anyhow, my parents made me take too many years of dance lessons, ballet and all, and I liked dancing but not that kind, so I got kind of good at the other kind. Hi, you here for the dance?"

Alex looked over his shoulder. A plump, pimply guy hovered in the doorway. "Yeah, is this—"

"Come on in, I'm the teacher. Ten dollars up front. My name's Delia."

"Benjamin Franklin," the poor guy said apologetically as he handed over a couple of five-dollar bills. "I don't know why my folks did that to me."

"Ben, this is Alex," Delia said, stowing the fives. "Let's wait for the other two guys so I won't have to do this twice. Ben, have you danced much?"

"I'm clumsy," Ben said miserably. "I can dance, but in close dances, I'm all over the girl's feet."

"We'll work on that."

By eight on the dot, Carl and Larry had showed up. Alex thought, _Delia's got her work cut out. We're a bunch of dweebs._

Delia started the music and went through the basic moves of a very simple dance. "This is the Cabbage Patch," she said. "You can't do it with every song, but this is the perfect dance for people who think they can't dance. Everybody up. Watch me and follow me. This one's easy."

And they went through five different dances, ending with two slow dances. She showed them where to put their hands—"You can dance close if you know the girl's OK with that," she said, "but we won't do that." Each boy danced twice with her for each of the two slow dances. She offered correction and critique.

When the lesson was over, the guys headed out, but Alex lingered behind to thank Delia. "I guess I pretty much sucked," he said.

She smiled. "I wouldn't say that. You'll be OK with practice."

"Are you offering another lesson tomorrow?"

"Sure, if there's interest. Nobody's on for it yet. I'll need two students. Ten dollars again, though."

"Fine," he said. "Uh, are you planning to go to the Halloween dance?"

She gave him a rueful smile. "No, I don't have a girlfriend at the moment."

"I've got an extra ticket—oh."

"Oh," she said, laughing. "Yeah, not into guys, sorry."

"I wasn't trying to date you," Alex said. "I'm just making this worse. OK, here's the deal: There's this girl I like, and she'll be at the dance anyway, but I bought two tickets, so there's one left over. If you want it, I'll give it to you, but no strings attached."

"That's sweet, but I'm not going. Tomorrow here, eight o'clock. If another guy—or girl—shows up, we'll have the lesson, if not, I'll call it off. Ten's not enough to pay for my time. So call at seven forty-five, all right?"

As it happened, she did pick up another two students, a guy, Paul, and a girl, Lacy, so the lesson was on. Lacy was a short, shy girl, and the dances were the same as the first night's. Alex had a little more confidence. When Paul left at nine, Delia said, "You two want to practice for another half hour? You can dance together, and I'll watch and coach you. No extra charge."

It was a little strange, because instead of putting his hand on the small of Lacy's back, Alex had to put it higher up. But Lacy was cheerful and relaxed as they danced. After the half hour ended, Alex offered Delia another ten dollars, but she waved him off. "Just go and have a good time at the dance," she said. Good luck with the girl, and don't get all tight and awkward. Just stay loose, keep the beat, and have fun."

That was Sunday. The dance was coming up in six days.

Alex hoped that he would be able to get through at least the one dance that Wanda had sort of hinted she'd share with him.

Heck, with some luck, she might even dance with him twice.

He could only hope.

* * *

_3-Spell It Out_

Becca and Selene had to find a private place to experiment with the home-made Ouija board—Mel was too creeped out, and Selene's roommate Abby was a grind who couldn't study with the two of them asking questions and reading off the cryptic answers.

The fourth floor of the library offered small study carrels, just large enough for two people. On a Sunday evening, so few people used the library that all of the study rooms stood vacant. They chose the one at the far end, just for privacy's sake, and set up the board there. The Plexiglas cover was starting to pick up scratches—the washer slipped across it smoothly, but there were always little catches and snags, somehow.

They had tried several times, and finally they seemed to get in touch with a ghost, or something, anyway, that moved the planchette. The trouble was that the responses were not very clear.

That evening, the very first time they placed their fingertips—lightly—on the washer, it began to slip across the board. Becca used the tip of her left forefinger on the planchette, and with her right hand she recorded the results on a pad. "It's saying something," Selene said.

E-R-E H-M-A I

"Ere," Becca said. "Isn't that a poetic way to say _before?"_

"Before H M A I." Selene frowned. "H is for hour? Isn't M a Roman numeral?"

"Who knows?" asked Becca. "Oh, spirit, identify yourself."

Long pause, and then the letters OMEN.

"That doesn't sound good," Selene said. "Are you a spirit?"

The planchette glided to NO.

"What are your initials?" Becca tried.

MB

"M. Mary?" guessed Selene.

NO

"Wait, wait," Becca said. "The first thing—if you read it backward, it says IAMHERE. I am here. MB—my God, is this Bloody Mary?"

The washer began to vibrate so fast it seemed to buzz. Startled, both girls took their fingers off the planchette.

And still it moved.

It slipped to NO, hesitated, and then as if being dragged reluctantly, moved to YES.

The Plexiglas cover immediately became cloudy. Gray, then opaque. And with an electrical crackling, it broke into tiny fragments. The whole thing crumbled.

"I'm scared," Selene admitted.

Becca . . . wasn't. "I'm excited," she said. "I think we're on to something. We have to talk to her on Saturday night. You won't chicken out, will you?"

"Not if you won't."

Like Alex, the girls felt a strange mixture of dread and anticipation.

The dance was coming up in six days.

* * *


	8. Masquerades

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**8: Masquerades**

_1-Duds_

Luckily, mid-terms were not that hard—for Alex, anyway. He'd attended all his classes, except only one hour of one, and he took careful notes and read every line of the assignments. He sailed through and wasn't worried about his grades. By Wednesday before the party, he had only one big concern left.

What to wear.

Vampire? Frankenstein monster? Phantom of the Opera? Werewolf? Mummy?

"I can't pull off scary," Alex told himself. Anyway, the Halloween Super Shop downtown would probably sell out of all the monster stuff early.

So—clown? Wrong message, dude. Rock star! Um . . . put that in the "maybe" pile. International spy? "The name is Pines . . . Alex Pines." Couldn't keep a straight face.

He called the front desk of Dowling and asked the girl on phone duty, "Do you have a Nicole there?"

"Who is this?" the girl asked.

"Uh, you wouldn't know me. My name's Alex Pines—"

"Are you the guy who's dating Wanda?" The girl's voice sounded gleeful.

"No, no, we—we're not actually—well, we did have lunch—"

"Ha! This is Nicole! Hi! Do you want me to ring Wanda's room?"

"Um, no, I have her number. Look, Wanda and I aren't really serious, but, um, I like her and all, and—OK, what I want to know is what she's going to wear as a costume to the masquerade ball, that's all."

"Oh?" Nicole made it a drawn-out, up-and-down word: "O-o-O-o-Ohhhhl." She giggled. "Why would you want to know that?"

"So I'll have an idea of what I'd like to wear," he said.

More giggling. "So you, like, have a thing for Wanda?"

Did he? Did he? Alex thought hard. "I . . . l guess I kind of do." When Nicole giggled some more, he said, "The truth is, I don't know. I like her. She sort of said she might dance with me, one time. I'm not stalking her or anything. I'm . . . uh, I'm harmless. Come on, please."

"What if she doesn't want to dance with you?"

"I'll ask her once. If she doesn't, she doesn't, and I'll leave her alone. I won't even say hi to her if I see her on the campus. I just—I haven't felt this way about a girl. Not ever."

"Aww."

"I'm serious."

"You sure are." Long pause. "You got a sense of humor?"

"If I told you, you'd just laugh."

There was a moment of surprise, and then Nicole did laugh. "OK, you got one. Show it more. Listen, Wanda's a little too serious for her own good. When she loosens up and laughs, she gets a whole lot nicer."

"Thanks," Alex said. "Is she going to wear a costume?"

"Yes. She's got it already. She's going as a character from a kids' book."

"If I asked very politely what the book was, and who the character is?"

In a playful voice, Nicole said, "Are you sure you don't want to go with me? I'm gonna be a PG-sexy nurse."

"Thanks," Alex said. "But there's something about Wanda that I just—like."

"That's OK," Nicole said. "I've got a boyfriend. He's gonna be a doctor."

"Could you give me a hint?" Alex asked. " _Peter Pan? Mother Goose? Winnie-the-Pooh?_ "

"You're way cool, man. Um . . . think penguins."

" _Who Framed Roger Rabbit?_ "

Nicole lost it. "You're thinking Jessica? Dream on! Anyway, that isn't a book."

"Yes, it is," Alex said. "Not for kids, though. _Mr. Popper's Penguins?"_

"I never even heard of that one. Is it real?"

Alex sighed. "Nicole. There's like a hundred million kids' books. I'll never get it on my own."

"A little hint," Nicole said. "A flying nanny."

 _Click._ "Mary Poppins!"

"I didn't tell you, you just guessed!" Nicole said. "If she asks, remember that."

"OK, thanks. Oh—the penguins were just in the movie, not the book."

"Yeah, that's what Wanda said, too. Good luck, Alex. I'll see you at the dance, and if you STP with Wanda, I might dance one dance with you. My boyfriend's pretty chill."

"Uh—OK. Thanks!"

So—Mary Poppins? Then his choice was obvious. He'd be a chimney sweep. He guessed that Wanda would take the movie as her model, so he'd do it, too. If only he could remember what the character looked like. He wore a hat? Maybe not. He wasn't sure.

However, he could visit the VideoMax and rent the tape. In fact, since it was not yet six o'clock, he'd do that right this minute. Then he'd just have to find some guy who'd lend him a VCR to watch it.

By six-thirty he was back in the dorm. Vonnie Dubeque, on the fourth floor, had a video machine. He was on his way out, but Alex caught him at the door of his room and asked if he could borrow the VCR for a couple of hours. No, but he could rent it for five dollars. Deal.

In his room, Alex hooked up the machine and watched the tape, fast-forwarding because he remembered the story from when he was a little kid. So—

He made some notes on a yellow pad.

Cloth newsboy's cap, brown or gray (there seemed to be two). Long red scarf to be tied around the neck, stained with soot in some scenes, not in others. A dark gray sport jacket. Jeans. Ankle boots, brown.

Whoops, and a flat straw hat with a red and white-striped hatband, a coat with awning stripes of red, white, and orange, white shirt, sky-blue bow tie, immaculate white trousers, white shoes—that was from the chalk-drawing outfit. Maybe . . . not. Alex would look and feel goofier in that than in the chimney-sweeping scene. OK, go for the first look, but with a little messiness—stain the red scarf, some black makeup smudged on his face. But no broom. What the heck would he do with it if she did agree to dance with him?

So Alex scratched through the second outfit. There was a flea-market type store downtown, and he could probably find the jacket there and, with luck, the cap. The jeans he had, and a pair of lightweight hiking boots that would pass. In the chimney-sweeping scenes, the shirt was gray, but maybe he could find that at the used-clothing store, too.

He returned the VCR to Dubeque, who asked him if he'd been watching porn and seemed disappointed when he said no, just a regular movie. "Hey," Alex said, "do you know what STP means?"

Dubeque nodded. "It's an additive you put in with engine oil if you engine's knocking."

"OK." What the heck had Nicole meant by it? He didn't have a clue.

That night as he lay in bed, a horrible thought flitted through his mind— _What if Nicole had been kidding him about Wanda's costume?_

Oh, well. No rule said that he and Wanda had to match. He'd be in costume, and that would be OK for a masquerade dance.

* * *

"Ta-da!" said Nicole. "What do you think?" She struck a hip-cocked pose and smiled.

She was wearing a white nylon lab coat, just barely knee-length, plus white stockings and red mid-heel shoes. Her collar had a red badge with a white cross to suggest the nursi-ness, and she'd wear a nurse's cap to the dance, too. Her lips were a very intense scarlet—the reddest red lipstick Wanda had ever seen.

"Not too shabby!" Heather, who was dressed as a policewoman, said. "Wanda, that's an interesting outfit. What is it?"

"I," Wanda said, "am a proper English nanny!" Her slate-gray skirt came down to her ankles, her Navy-blue jacket was tailored and long, hip-length, and like Nicole, she wore mid-heel shoes, but hers were black. "Here, let me put the last touch on." She donned a black straw hat with a red poppy decoration, tilted it jauntily on her head, and then drew on short white gloves.

"Mary Poppins!" whooped Luisa. "OMG, you have to let me do your hair in a bun!"

"Thanks," Wanda said. "That would be great. I was wondering if I could do that myself."

"Center part, braid, yeah, take me half an hour!" Luisa said. "I love it! But can you even dance in those shoes and that skirt?"

"I probably won't dance at all," Wanda said. "I'm planning to spend a lot of time selling concessions."

"Come on," Heather said. "It's a dance! If there's a good-looking guy—"

Nicole said, "Cut her a little slack. There's a guy she just might dance with—once. Maybe twice if she's lucky."

"He probably won't even show up," Wanda said.

"Who is it?" Luisa asked. "Do we know him?"

"No, he's just a guy," Wanda said irritably. "I've never dated him or anything."

"Just a lunch date," Nicole teased. "I think he's got a crush on our girl! I've seen him."

"Is he hunky?" asked Luisa.

"Mm, I'd give him about an eight," Nicole said. "Who knows, he could clean up nice. Main problem is, he's a freshman."

"What's wrong with that?" Heather asked. "A college romance, pfft, two years is nothing!"

"He's mature for his age," Wanda snapped. And immediately she blushed. "I mean, I'm not defending him, but he's not—he seems OK."

Nicole, perhaps realizing how flustered Wanda was getting, said, "Back off, girls. It's Wanda's business, right?"

They murmured, subdued and maybe a bit surprised at the mild scolding.

"Thanks," Wanda said. "If he shows up, I may dance with him once. He's . . . OK."

"What's his name?" asked Luisa.

"Alex Pines," Wanda told her.

None of them knew him, which was not surprising. It was a pretty big campus, after all.

"Don't worry," Nicole told the others. "After the dance, we'll all get together, and Wanda will tell us all about Alex."

"No, I won't!" Wanda said, redder than ever.

* * *

_2-Tricks_

Melissa had a date for the dance. He was Dane Wilton, a fellow freshman whom she had known, but never dated, in high school. Dane was all right, not bad looking, if not exactly handsome. He had a reputation as a good dancer, and no one had ever accused him of being a horndog. He was kind of quiet, joked around a little, wasn't too shy, wasn't too bold, right there in the middle.

They were going as a couple of clowns. Melissa was a classic Pierrot in whiteface, floppy white hat, white ruffled collar, baggy white jacket, baggy white pants, and white mesh shoes. As for Dane, he was going to be a hobo clown, like Emmert Kelly, Jr.

Things had been sort of cool between her and her roommate for a few days. However, thinking about the dance, Mel started to wonder about her friend. On Thursday, she asked Becca, "Aren't you even going to wear a costume?"

Becca shrugged. "I'll go as a college girl," she said. "Just you know, dress up nice."

"Isn't Sammy going with you?" Mel knew that Becca had gone to a couple of movies with Sammy Turnwold.

"He's gonna go home tomorrow afternoon and won't be back until Sunday evening," Becca said. She'd been sitting at her desk, fiddling with something. "There we go."

"What are you doing?" Mel asked.

With a grin, Becca held up a silvery hook, sort of like a fishhook but with a tighter bend in it. "Making something."

"It looks like a big paper clip," Mel said.

"That's because it is one," Becca said. "One of these." She held up a jumbo-sized gem clip, close to three inches long. "Bought a pack in the bookstore."

"What are you going to do with it?" Mel asked.

"A magic trick. I'll show you." She went out into the hall and closed the door. "Turn the knob lock," she said.

Wondering what she was up to, Melissa turned the lock. She did not set the deadbolt, which was a T-shaped knob just below the doorknob. "OK, it's locked."

"Watch this!" Becca called to Mel, who was standing just inside.

Melissa saw the hook come wiggling through the crack in the door, just above the doorknob. It slipped down slowly, then pulled back. The door gave a little click, and Becca pulled it open without even turning the knob. "Call me Miss Houdini!" she said.

"How'd you do that?" asked Melissa.

"It's a secret," Becca said. "Now we're set in case we ever get locked out of the room."

"Unless we lock the deadbolt, too," Mel pointed out.

"When was the last time we did that?" Becca asked. "Don't worry about it. This is just in case something happens."

Melissa looked at her roommate doubtfully. But she couldn't think of any other reason Becca had tried out that little trick.

Becca dropped the paperclip and two unbent ones in her purse. "Aw, crap," she said, pulling out a silver chain. One of the paperclips had tangled with it, and she started to slip it off the chain.

"What's that?" Melissa asked.

"Necklace." She got the paperclip off, then pulled a tissue from the box to wrap around the necklace to keep it from getting entangled again.

"You're not a Catholic!" Melissa was a little scandalized. She _was_ Catholic.

"There's no rule about who can or can't wear a cross pendant," Becca said. "I'll probably wear this to the dance. Ward off evil guys."

"It doesn't work that way," Melissa muttered.

"Doesn't hurt to try," Becca said with a smile.

* * *


	9. Faces Reflected

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**9:** **Faces Reflected**

_1-A Chimney Sweep's Lucky_

A measure of a young man's confidence is how much cologne he applies.

The more the fragrance, the lower the self-assurance.

Judging from the almost visible cloud surrounding Alex Pines, one might conclude that his self-confidence had imploded, turned inside-out, and moved into the negative numbers. He'd spayed Polo Green on himself and his clothes to the point where he walked in an olfactory aura that could be matched only by an explosion in a spice warehouse.

That would be off-putting on a normal date. However, and this was his unsuspected saving grace, Alex would be walking and, he hoped, dancing among other young males, some of them smelling like musk oxen, some like pine and fir, some like bay rum, and perhaps one or two like sweaty, awkward young guys. In those days, there was a scent for every male. Alex's dad liked Old Spice, and that was the first cologne Alex had ever tried, but once in high school a girl that he was sort of interested in him had sniffed him as he sat beside her in the classroom and had asked, "Why do you smell so much like my grandpa?"

Since then, most mornings he settled for just a spray of a relatively tame deodorant in each armpit. But then, he had never been on a serious date before—just a couple of double dates. And he had yet to dance with a girl in any way other than a kind of goofing around on the dance floor.

Truth to tell, Alex was insecure about the social preparations for a real dance. Back in the high-school locker room after PE, he'd noticed a couple of guys who, if rumor held even one grain of truth in it, had very active dating lives, and as a rule, these boys used the Ralph Lauren stuff and lots of it, so the next time he bought toiletries, Polo Green was on his shopping list. In moderation, it wasn't objectionable—no floral notes in the fragrance, but the scents of green growing grass and fresh basil and thyme, with a hint of cloves.

He had showered early on that Saturday evening, at a time when no one else seemed to be on the floor, and then in the privacy of his room he'd sprayed deodorant and a little cologne under his arms, then added a little more on his chest, then to balance that, a few spritzes on his bare back, and . . . his eyes started to burn, so he made that the last spray. He didn't really notice, but a fly trapped in the room buzzed to the closed window, banged on it frantically, but then coughed in a fly-like way and fell on its back, completely overcome.

After the cologne had more or less dried, Alex put on underwear, socks, jeans, and the hiking boots. He donned and tucked in the long-sleeved gray-blue shirt (fifty cents, and somewhat baggy on him), rolled the sleeves up to the elbows, and with needle and thread he nervously tacked the sleeve rolls so they wouldn't come loose during the dance. He'd carefully stained the shirt with dark gray powdered tempera paint. It certainly looked as if it had been inside a few chimneys.

The bookstore sold teeny little Halloween makeup kits, marked down by forty per cent just the day before, and he'd bought one almost entirely for the little jar of black and the little jar of white. It took him five minutes to get his nerve up.

But then a couple dabs of the black greasepaint, a dot or two of white, and he smeared it into a thin layer. He studied himself in the mirror. The result looked pretty sooty to him, anyway.

The little half-ounce of greasepaint wasn't enough to stain the dark-gray sport jacket and the lighter gray vest. Instead, he sponged on some black India ink for that climbing-through-chimneys ambience. Both garments were badly worn—the lining of the jacket had rips in it, and the vest had no buttons, but it would hang open, anyway. Together, coat and vest had cost him only two dollars. He'd really lucked out at that used-clothing store, finding a medium-gray soft felt newsboy's cap, a little large for his head but worn and nearly shapeless. Fifty cents!

He put it on, looked at himself in the mirror, tilting it left and right. Finally he put folded strips of tissue in the inner band of the cap, which made it fit better. Finally, he tied a yard-long, four-inch wide strip of red fabric—he had bought it for a quarter in a cloth-remnant shop—around his neck. He'd dabbed and smeared it with more slightly diluted black ink until it had a nicely soiled appearance, and now the stains were dry.

"'Ello, 'ello, 'ello, wot's all this, then?" he asked his reflection. "Blimey, it's Mary Poppins! 'Ello, Mary Poppins!"

_Jeeze I might as well not go. She's going to laugh at me. I'd even laugh at me!_

On the other hand, his Cockney accent was no worse than Dick van Dyke's. Maybe he could make a thing of how bad he sounded.

Alex turned on his mix tape and practiced some dance steps. Then he checked the time. What a relief. He'd managed to get ready with time to spare.

Three hours or so, in fact. Oh, well. Maybe the cologne would simmer down in that time. He didn't want flowers to wilt and paint to peel as he passed by. He thought he should practice his dance steps a little more—but no, he was too nervous to do that. What if he was too timid even to dance?

_Maybe I'll go and just talk to her._

No, that was pointless. After all, he had gone to the trouble of planning his costume, buying the pieces, making them look sooty, all that stuff. And he had taken a couple of hours of dance lessons. And when he'd gone, all alone, to lunch, he had bought himself a chicken-salad sandwich so he could have a quick dorm-room dinner before walking over to the Student Center. It was chilling in the fridge, with a liter-sized bottle of root beer. And he had a plastic film-wrapped brownie for dessert. All that and a bag of chips.

Somehow, though, he wasn't hungry. When he thought of the sandwich, his stomach modestly told him, Thanks, anyway, but really I couldn't.

_Maybe I'd better not eat before I go. It probably wouldn't impress Wanda much if I barfed on her._

To go or not to go, that was the question.

_OK, what do I do if she laughs at me?_

_Same thing I did at all the high-school dances. Lean against the wall for fifteen minutes and then slink out, hoping nobody notices me leaving._

Alex took a deep breath. _I will eat at six. And at six forty-five I will walk over to the Student Center. And I will talk to Wanda Bailey._

_And whatever happens, I'll deal with it._

* * *

_2-Two Is One Too Many_

Becca went to the dance dressed as if she were going to a normal dance: Half-sleeved light-purple top, blue miniskirt, red shoes. Selene looked like, well, Peter Pan: Belted forest-green tunic with a zig-zag hem, pale green tights, green ballet flats. In lieu of a purse, she wore a green leather belt pouch. She planned on changing into her costume after the business at hand.

Half an hour before the dance was to begin, they slipped away from the rest of the work crew putting the finishing touches in the dance area. The snack bar was closed—the normal staff would be helping with concessions—and around the corner the lights in a short hall were out. Becca clicked them on and then took out her bent paper clip. "I've practiced on the dorm door," she said. "You grab the doorknob and when I tell you, pull. We ought to do this quick."

Selene grasped the knob. Hunkering down, Becca pushed the hooked end of the oversized paper clip into the crack of the door. She slipped it lower—it was a tight fit—until it reached the latch bolt. She pulled, but the hook hadn't gone in far enough. She pressed it back until she felt, rather than heard, a click. If only the deadbolt below hadn't been set . . . .

"Here goes." Becca tugged the clip. The latch bolt resisted. "Push the doorknob," she said, and Selene did, leaning into it. That took the pressure off the bolt, and this time when Becca pulled, she felt the latch slip back. "Now, pull!"

Selene did, and the door opened. "Come in and close the door," Becca said. "Wait a second, where's the light switch—here they are. Come in!"

Selene slipped inside as Becca turned on the lights. The storage room was about fifteen feet deep and ten wide, crowded with aluminum racks stacked deep and high with rolls of commercial-grade paper towels, bathroom tissue, cleaning solutions and supplies, tons of paper cups, and other such things. "Wait here," Becca said. "The bathroom's all the way at the back. I'll turn on the light there and call you."

Selene nodded—she seemed too nervous to speak—and Becca hurried down an aisle with paper plates, cups, and boxes of plastic forks, spoons, and knives on one side and commercial-sized boxes of cleansing powder, jugs of disinfectant mopping and scouring liquids, boxes of steel wool, and huge bottles of window cleaner. The gray door, unmarked as a restroom, was unlocked. She opened it and turned on the lights. "Come on!" she called, in that kind of muted yell people do when they need to communicate but fear to alert others.

The overhead fluorescents flickered off. She heard Selene blunder against a rack, rattling something. "Back here! Be careful."

Selene emerged and hurried over. She slipped inside, Becca closed the door, and there they were, in a slightly-too-large bathroom. It had only one stall, but a long counter with three sinks and three tall mirrors. "Did you lock the door?" Selene asked.

"I shut it," Becca said. "It locks automatically. The doorknob lock is set to lock, see—I just slipped the latch back. But it'll be locked outside. Hang on."

She turned the inner thumb-bolt in the bathroom door, locking that, too. "OK, let's get set up. You need to use the bathroom?"

"No, I just want to get this over."

"OK. Here's our candle. Which sink?"

"Middle one," Selene said. "If something happens, I'll probably run."

"No, don't do that. Stick it out. Couple of rules, all right?"

"What?"

"Number one—if we see Bloody Mary in the mirror, remember, she's on the other side. She may look like she's going to attack us, but she's in the mirror and we're out here. But she may look like she's behind us. If she is, they say she'll answer questions for you, as long as you don't turn around and look at her. If you do that, she can get you. So if she looks like she's outside of the mirror, don't look directly at her. Got that?"

"I'll remember," Selene said.

Becca had brought a three-inch-tall red votive candle. She took it out, along with a book of paper matches. "I'm gonna set this up on this sink," she said, indicating the left one. She struck a match and touched it to the candle wick. The wick charred and curled, a small blue flame rapidly turning yellow. Within seconds, it burned steadily.

"Turn out the lights," Becca said. "Switch is right beside the door—"

"Got it." Selene clicked the switch, and they found themselves in deep darkness.

"Let's wait until our eyes adjust," Becca said. "The candle will seem brighter once we get used to it."

They talked in low voices while they waited. Becca was right—before long, the candle was enough to give them a dim yellow illumination. Since it was at waist level, it made their faces in the mirror look strange, evil.

"I think we're ready," Becca said. "Stand next to me. Look at your face in the mirror. Look into your eyes. Try not to blink. First I'm gonna try the rhyme. We won't spin around or anything. Just keep looking at your face."

"My eyes are already watering," Selene complained.

"That's fine, they're supposed to." Becca took a deep breath and then started to recite:

* * *

_Spirit, wandering in the night,_

_Come into our candle light._

_Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary._

_In darkness here we call to you,_

_Come back to the world you knew,_

_Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary._

_Hear our call and hurry straight_

_To the silver mirror-gate,_

_Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary._

_Spirit, wandering in the night,_

_Come into our candle light._

_Bloody Mary, B—_

* * *

"My face!" shrieked Selene.

* * *


	10. Coming Through

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**10: Coming Through**

_1-Time to Party_

Wanda had removed her hat and jacket and had hitched up the long skirt to help with the final decorating in the big ballroom. At the far end, DJ Eric had set up his equipment, and he was playing random tunes: "I Swear," "Your Boyz," and "On Bended Knee," changing tunes seamlessly because he had three boy-band CDs set up in his three players, all controlled by a boxy white Mac computer. Wanda noticed that Eric had a clipboard with a list on it, and after each number he popped the CD out of that player as the next one began, crossed something off on a list, put the CD away, popped another one in, and cued it up.

By that time, the second player had only a quarter of a minute of play time remaining, and when that cut ended, he'd pop out that CD and start the process all over again. Keeping a list of tracks and the CDs to find them on . . . Wanda liked that. Very efficient. Even if Eric did seem hung up on boy bands. The undependable co-DJ Josh had yet to show up, and nobody had heard from him, so Eric's choices probably would be what they had for the night.

"Is that the last bunch?" she asked from the top of the stepladder as she tied up the balloons. At the bottom of the ladder, Marcie Blume said, "That's it. Let's put the ladder away."

With a last glance at the cluster of orange and black balloons she had just tied to the exposed metal ceiling beams. Twenty bunches of twelve balloons each—two hundred and forty, and that was the final collection—at last!

She and Marcie folded the aluminum stepladder—with some difficulty—and then hefted it and carried it back to the long storage room, where they hung it—with some more difficulty—on the two big metal hooks on the wall. "Is that all?" Marcie asked Wanda.

"I think so. I'm going to wash my hands and check my blouse for dust and junk. I should have waited to get dressed!"

"OK," Marcie said. "I'm going to turn into Little Bo Peep now. Mack's coming as a sheep!"

"Tell him to be a lamb!" Wanda advised, smiling. She headed for the girls' room, but Mrs. Rickard caught her on the way. "Oh, Wanda—would you run a quick errand?"

"What?" Wanda asked.

"Maintenance didn't put out any paper cups for the punch table. They're in a storage room just past the snack bar—turn right, and it's straight down the hall. Find an open box of cups—there will be stacks of them inside, in plastic wrap, fifty cups to a stack. Bring five stacks back to the table. That's enough for a start. Just a second—" she searched through about a dozen keys on a big keyring. "Here, this one will open both locks. Thank you!"

"That's OK," Wanda said as she took the ring from Mrs. Rickard. "I was going to wash my hands in the girls' room—"

"There's a bathroom in the very back of the storage room, and the same key opens that door," Mrs. Rickard said.

"OK, I'll wash up there."

At the entrance to the ballroom, the girls had already set up the ticket table. As of that afternoon, ticket sales stood at 895, and Mrs. Rickard advised that they could expect about fifty more at-the-door sales, but they'd brought a hundred tickets just in case. Heather and Luisa had set up the table—heavy cashbox, tickets, a rubber stamp and ink pad for hand stamps.

"Where's the rest of your outfit?" Luisa asked.

"Hanging in the cloak room. They had me tying balloons to the ceiling."

"Looking good anyway, girl!" In red and yellow Spandex and hood, Luisa was a superhero of some kind—Wanda didn't read comic books—and Heather was a fembot, though only her torso, arms, and helmet looked remotely like real metal. Her tights were gold lamé, to give her enough freedom of movement to dance.

Some costumed kids had already drifted into the lobby—a group as Wizard of Oz characters, Dorothy and a Scarecrow, a Tin Man and a female Cowardly Lion, and a cowboy and cowgirl, and—oh, my God.

"'Ello, Mary Poppins!" said Alex Pines, doffing his cap. "You're a foine soight, so you are!"

"Bert," Wanda said flatly. "Really?"

"Bert by name, Bert by nat'ure," he said. "And you are the one and only Mary Poppins!"

She stared him down. "Who told you?"

"It doesn't matter," he said in his normal voice. Then, smiling, he quietly asked, "OK, should I just go back to the dorm?"

She looked over his outfit, head to foot. "Where'd you rent that?"

"The costume? I didn't rent it—I put it together," Alex said. "Bought some cheap used clothes, a little makeup kit for the soot—how is it?"

"Not too shabby," she said in concession.

"Aw," he said, pouting. "See, shabby was wot I was aimin' at, innit?" Quietly, he asked, "Just one dance? We'd be a nice couple."

"One dance, and then we'll see," Wanda said. "Providing you stop trying to do that cheesy Cockney accent."

"I watched the movie again," he said. "And I think _mine's_ just as good as Dick van Dyke's!"

She had to laugh a little. "Just as bad."

Again he took off his cap and did a sweeping, graceful bow. "Roight you are, Mary Poppins!"

"I'll see you inside," she said. "I've got an errand to run."

"What is it?"

"Getting some supplies from a storage room."

"Let me come along. I'll help carry."

"Are you sure your name isn't Avis Pines? Because you're trying awfully hard."

"That's me all over, that is!" he said cheerfully. "Arsk anywhere, they'll tell you—that Bert, he's awf'ly tryin'!"

From the ticket table, all the way across the lobby, Luisa yelled, "Bert and Mary! Aw, look at you guys! You're so cute!" Somehow she packed three syllables into the word _cute._

"Come on if you're coming!" Wanda said irritably.

Alex trotted along by her side. They went into the dark hallway that led to the closed snack area, threaded through tables with chairs stacked atop them, and walked, their footsteps echoing, down a hall. "Where's the light switch?" she asked.

"I think over here," Alex said. In fact, he found a bank of six switches. The first one turned on the lights in the snack area, the second one didn't seem to do anything, the third turned on the lights in the hall they had just turned from and the fourth—aha! "Fiat lux!" he said. "That means—"

"I _know_ what it means," she said. Damn it! She'd lost track of the correct key. They got to the door—locked, as she expected—and she started to try keys, one after the other. "I don't remember what it looks like . . . no . . . no . . . no, the dance will be underway by the time we get back! This is it."

She unlocked and opened the door. Alex stepped inside and found the light switch for the storage room. "What are you looking for?"

"Drink cups. All cleaning stuff here . . . oh, down there, that's probably them, in the big boxes at the end of the row. Is one of them open?"

Alex went ahead of her. "Um . . . yeah, this one just has the flaps folded, but it's open." He pulled the flaps. "Half full. How many do you need?"

"Five stacks," Wanda said.

"Full? 'Cause this one just has a few left in it."

"Yes, full stacks, please."

Alex pulled them out. "Not heavy, but kind of awkward," he said. "No, you don't need to carry, I've got these. Is this all?"

"So far. Can you put the box back like it was?"

Alex set the stacks down against the rack behind him. "I think so. It's just you have to kind of bend one of the flaps—let me see—right here. There we go!" He pushed, and the flaps stuck in a semi-closed position.

"Here, I'll take at least a couple of stacks of cups, you get the rest. Thanks. Uh, hey, I didn't mean to be nasty, it's just—we've been working all day on decorations."

"Well, now you can relax," Alex said. "Trip the loight fantastic, eh, Mary Poppins?"

"We'll see."

They headed down the aisle and turned toward the door, Alex in the lead. He stopped and had his finger on the light switch, and Wanda had come up beside him when a girl's scream, high and horrible, split the air.

Alex froze. Wanda dropped the cups and dashed toward the back of the room.

"Wait!" he yelled.

But she didn't stop.

* * *

_2-The Wrong Side_

Becca froze. She couldn't see anything in the mirror—no Bloody Mary, anyway, just the dim reflections of herself and Selene, and no monstrous change in Selene's face, but Selene was screaming and screaming and started to claw at her cheeks.

And Selene—

In the flickering weak yellow light of the candle, staring at her reflection, Selene saw her face melt, like running wax exposed to a furnace blast of heat.

Her eyebrows drooped and sagged, her nose flowed away over her gaping lips, leaving behind a skull's triangular black cavity, her lips were running teeth being exposed, oh, God, her left eye was crawling in a gush of liquid flesh and blood down her cheek, a baleful snail of a thing—she shrieked again.

Behind her, unnoticed, someone or something rattled the doorknob.

"Who's in there?" a girl's voice yelled.

"Sh, sh, shhh!" Becca commanded, trying to pull Selene away from the mirror. "Close your eyes!" she hissed. "Close your eyes! Don't look!"

But how could Selene _not_ look as her face in the mirror became that of a months-old corpse, dissolving into semi-liquid rot—

Light poured in. Her face returned to normal.

Becca pulled her away. "We were leaving!"

But Wanda Bailey stood in the doorway, the light coming from the storage room behind her. "Selene? And Rebecca Thebalt? You're not supposed to be in here—"

"We were getting ready," Becca said. "Selene got scared."

"Take her outside and calm her down," Wanda snapped. "You can take the stacks of cups to the front table for me. I'll talk to you later!"

The two rushed down to the front of the room, where a boy in a chimney-sweep costume stepped aside. They didn't speak, but pushed past him, making him drop the cups he had been holding, and as the girls ran out, Alex hustled to the back of the room. He saw the open door to the dark room—he didn't know what it was, other than dark—and said, "Wanda, what's wrong?"

He heard her make a disgusted noise. "Nothing, just two of our girls trying to summon up a ghost or some stupid thing. Look at this—a candle, an open flame—

As Alex came up to her, he said, "This is a bathroom!"

"Yes, I meant to wash some dust off my hands." She picked up the candle. "Those two ought to get dorm restriction for this. Get the light."

Behind Alex, the door had swung closed, dropping the darkness into the room like a rush of ink.

Alex felt around, but the switches weren't where he expected. Must be on the other side of the door—

Wanda, holding the lit candle, said, "Hurry up!"

"I'm looking, I'm looking! What were they doing?"

"Trying to call up Bloody Mary—"

Wanda gasped, and Alex spun around.

He couldn't believe it. In the mirror a ghastly face had appeared—a haggard woman, with long, straggling black hair, streaks of blood on forehead and cheeks, mouth a dark, leering gap with a scatter of yellow tombstone teeth, eyes black as coal but glittering with twin reflections of the candle flame—

"Let go of me!" Wanda yelled.

It was crazy, he couldn't take it in, but Alex saw that two claw-like hands had emerged from the mirror, had grasped Wanda's wrists—

The candle fell into a dry sink, and somehow the little flame faltered, flickered, but did not die—

And Alex shouted in alarm as those hideous claws began to drag Wanda into the mirror.

* * *


	11. Through the Looking-Glass

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**11: Through the Looking-Glass**

_1-Swallowed_

In the flickering light of the fallen candle, now on its side in the sink, Alex grabbed Wanda—around the waist. Her head and shoulders had already vanished into the mirror, which had seemingly turned to a thick liquid. Her feet left the floor, kicking.

Wildly, leaning backward, straining to haul Wanda out, Alex saw that the mirror had gone absolutely black, as if a vertical wall of liquid tar were dragging Wanda in. He felt his shoulders creak with effort.

Despite everything, Wanda sank further in, pulled by some strong force, slipping in up to her waist with a sudden jerk, and Alex lost his hold. He lunged, grabbed, hooked his fingers in the waistband of her long skirt—and it tore off, peeling down her legs until he nearly fell on his butt before letting it drop. Now her hips were vanishing. Desperately, Alex grabbed both of her ankles and pulled backward as hard as he could. For a second, he thought he was gaining—

And then another terrible, strong yank, and his feet left the floor, and as Wanda disappeared into the mirror, so did he—he felt a clammy, cold, viscid sensation as his arms and head were pulled in. Wanda fell, her distorted scream coming to him as if through a thick layer of muffling cotton, and then he felt his legs pass through, and he tumbled down on top of her. "Are you OK?" he shouted frantically.

"Get off me!" she yelled, sounding furious.

"Where are we? Sorry!" They had shouted simultaneously. Alex rolled to the side, but he kept his grip on one ankle. Everything lay in impenetrable darkness.

"Let go!" She kicked.

He tightened his hold. "Then give me your hand! We can't get separated!"

"Here." He felt her twist around. Where the hell were they? The surface beneath them was cold, sticky, weirdly soft—it had the texture of a huge mushroom. And the air smelled stale and acrid, stinging his nostrils. She flailed her arm around, and her hand slapped at his head. She had curled up on her side.

With his free hand, Alex reached up to grasp her wrist. "Got you. Hold on!"

He could hear her gasping. She snapped at him: "You pulled my skirt off!"

"What are you wearing under?

"Just panties and tights!"

"That'll do! I can't see anything, anyway. I'm sorry, I was trying to pull you back. Wait, let me turn over. I'm going to shift hands, but don't turn loose before I do."

He sat up, reached over with his right hand, and took her left in his. Then he let go his hold with his left hand. "What got you?"

"Bloody damn Mary, I think!" she said, sounding more furious than frightened. "I couldn't see much—two hands reached out and grabbed my wrists, or claws or something, they looked like skin stretched over bones—I can't see a thing!"

"I can't, either."

"Do you have matches?"

"I don't smoke. Can you stand up?"

Wanda writhed. "It stinks in here. I think so. Don't let go of my hand."

But—neither of them could sit up. As they tried, they fell back again and again, thudding into the yielding, nasty-feeling floor. It felt as though gravity had been turned up, or as though elastic bands were tugging them backward each time they tried to rise.

"Something's wrong," Alex said. "Lie still just for a moment. Rest and we'll figure something out."

"This is impossible. This is a nightmare, it's not real."

"I think it's kind of real," Alex said. "We're here together. I think—maybe I can see something. Hang on." He felt her body next to him, oriented himself—"Sorry, I didn't mean to cop a feel!"

"That's my shoulder!"

"Oh, still sorry."

It took writhing, and he had to move in ways that didn't make sense, but finally they lay on their backs, shoulder to shoulder. "OK," he said, "look toward our feet. Now look up, about forty-five degrees, maybe a little more. See that?"

"I can't see a thing. What is it?"

"Maybe it's the mirror, but it's really dim. Keep looking."

"Kind of—a dim square? Barely visible? Sort of yellowish?"

"That's it," he said.

"That's the mirror?" she asked.

"Maybe," he said. "But it looks wrong."

He didn't add the thought that instantly came to him:

_Wrong because we're seeing it from the other side._

* * *

_2-Out_

For the lead-off dance, Eric the DJ had fired up a rowdy dance tune, "6 Days," a frantic synth number that already had a few dozen couples, and a few singles, out on the floor writhing and keeping the beat.

Above the music, Mrs. Rickard asked , "Where is Wanda Bailey?"

Heather, who had been greeting couples—they were spilling in now, in all manner of costumes—looked around. "I don't see her. She was putting up balloons a few minutes ago."

"Before we opened the doors, I sent her to the storage room to bring back some cups," Mrs. Rickard said. "The punch table doesn't have any."

"Maybe she couldn't find them."

"They should be pretty obvious. Would you please run down to the storage room and see if she's all right?"

"Sure," Heather said. She walked away, rustling. She had come as a fairy. A death-metal fairy—black layered taffeta gown, its rows of lace set off by silver spangles, small tattered bat-wings fluttering at her shoulders, white makeup turning her face into a skull. Her boyfriend had not yet shown up, but then Tag was almost always half an hour late for everything. She looked for him as she went out into the lobby but didn't see him there. A queue of students was inching in as the girls at the desk took their tickets and stamped their hands, and a small crowd had bunched up to buy tickets.

Heather made her way through them and then crossed the lobby and went past the snack area—huh, the lights in the hall were on, so somebody must have come that way. She walked back through the short hall to the storage room door, expecting it to be locked, but it swung open when she tried the handle. Lights were on in the storeroom, too. "Hey, Wanda?" she called.

She heard someone make a weird noise, half query, half growl, but couldn't tell where it came from. She walked down the rows of racks until she spied the stacks of cups lying on the floor, against the metal shelf unit.

"What in the—" grunting, she walked down the aisle and gathered up the cups, her costume rustling like light, dry autumn leaves. Then she saw from the corner of her eye someone standing down a couple of aisles, next to the bathroom door. She recognized, or thought she recognized, Wanda, sort of stooping with her back to Heather, fiddling with the waistband of her skirt.

"Hey, Wanda! Wardrobe accident?" she asked.

Wanda grunted.

"Need help?"

"Uh-uh."

"OK, Norma wants these cups RDN, so I'll take them down. Don't forget to turn off the lights and lock up."

Another grunt.

Heather hurried back down the aisle and out the door. She did not glance back, and so she did not see the taut, terrible face of Bloody Mary rear back to glare at her. Coming through the mirror had put her into a duplicate of Wanda's clothes, though they were a poor fit on her skeletal frame.

And now, burning with hatred, she yearned to—

She didn't know what. But the living would suffer.

She'd go to the dance. And she'd bring the house down.

Snarling, she lunged, but she didn't manage even one full step.

If she could only break the invisible bond that shackled her to the bathroom door. She struggled, trying with all her strength to move toward the front of the room.

And the tough, elastic air held her the way a spiderweb grasps an insect. The invisible strands pulled her backward, into the nearly-dark bathroom, toward the mirror from which she had escaped. She snarled, furious. The more she struggled to go forward, the more the force hauled her backward.

She wanted to get free.

She _would_ get free!

And when she did—

Oh, she'd kill them all!

* * *

_3-Run!_

Selene and Becca had not slowed since bolting out of the storage room. They had pounded down the hall, through the lobby, out the Student Center door, and away from the building, and unlike all the fleeing girls in every horror movie ever made, neither of them stumbled and fell. They didn't speak until they had crossed the quad. Then at the side of the library, they turned, looking back.

Dusk lay on the quad, but the front of the Student Center lay bright with lights, and the big floor-to-ceiling windows of the entrance showed the students inside, lining up to enter the dance, and more silhouettes of arriving costumed students going in through the door.

"Is it coming?" Selene asked, her voice trembling on the edge of full-out panic. "Is it after us?"

Panting, Becca said, "I—I don't see anything." She drew in deep, deep breaths, and then a little more in control, she added, "I think we got away."

"What'll we do, what'll we—"

"We won't tell anybody," Becca said firmly. "Get hold of yourself. She's just a reflection in a mirror—"

"You saw her? Selene still sounded as if any moment she'd start screaming. "Am I crazy? You saw her, didn't you?"

 _Did I see her? I saw Selene's reflection and—and something else, but—_ Becca couldn't form a mental picture of whatever had been in the mirror. She said, "I got a glimpse. Did you?"

"It was horrible. Like a zombie, a dead person, skin and bone and all bl-bloody—" Selene shook and then screamed.

"Shh!" Becca said, gripping Selene's arm hard. "Don't do that!" Across the quad, heads turned toward the sound. "Come on. Let's go to the dorm!"

"But we left Wanda in there—"

Dragging Selene by the wrist, retreating from the quad, Becca clenched her jaw. "Don't worry about Wanda. She'll be OK! She—she always knows what to do!"

"But—our dates will be looking for us!"

"Do you really want to go back where that thing isr?" Becca asked.

Selene didn't answer, but she stopped holding back and hurried with Becca toward Dowling Hall. And about every twenty steps along the way—she looked back fearfully over her shoulder at nothing.

At the deepening darkness.

At the night.

* * *


	12. Stumbling

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**12: Stumbling**

_1-Masqueraders_

Cheryl and Navin—at the moment costumed as a DC supervillain—the one with green hair and a wide grin—and his right-hand gal—the one in a red-and-black jester's one-piece and cap with bells—had danced a couple of slow dances, pressed tight, and decided they needed some snog time. "Come on," she said. "There's a dark hallway I know of."

The main hall past the lobby was dark, and so was the cross-hall she meant, the one leading back toward the storage room. "This is more like it," Navin said, taking off his mask. Cheryl only wore a small domino mask, so it was no impediment. Navin pressed her against the wall. "Come here, you."

"Mm!" They locked lips, she stood only on her left foot, and she raised her right leg and encouraged Vance by pressing her foot against his buttocks. Their tongues attempted to play basketball with each other's uvula.

He put his hand on her breast and squeezed. "No bra," he said affectionately.

"Oh, yeah if this was a little bit more private, I'd show you—"

Something snarled.

The two students snapped apart. "We weren't doing anything!" Navin said.

The hall was not completely dark, of course. A faint leakage of light from the lobby flowed down and to a small extent relieved the darkness in the side hall. The two could see someone down at the far end.

"That's Wanda Bailey!" Cheryl said. "She's an RA!"

They were close enough to the light switches for Navin to click one. The fluorescents overhead flickered on, and Navin gave a little startled "Yeep!"

The girl down the hall stretched out bloody, clawed hands toward them. Her eyes glared madly. Blood-matted black hair straggled wildly over her cheeks and neck.

Cheryl swatted the light switch, dropping the darkness again, and she grabbed Navin's hand and dragged him out of there, fast. "I dropped my mask!" he complained.

"Fuck the mask!" Cheryl said.

"But—"

"We're not going back to the damn dance!" Cheryl said. "Maybe she didn't recognize us. Come on, let's go take your truck out and go parking. I'm in the mood."

"OK," he said obediently.

"Look, don't tell anybody what our costumes are, OK?"

"Got it. What the hell was the RA dressed up for?"

"She's a zombie Mary Poppins or something," Cheryl said. "Side door, side door!"

Driven equally by guilt, fear, and post-adolescent lust, they fled into the night went to Navin's pickup truck, and set off for a lover's lane not far from the campus. They pass out of the events here. Suffice it to say they had a pleasant time, followed by nightmares for each, she did not get pregnant, and they broke up by Christmas.

Meanwhile, back in the hallway Bloody Mary felt as though the air had thickened to the consistency of thick mud, and she made no headway as she tried to struggle through it. She kept feeling tugs trying to pull her backward, back to the imprisoning mirror. Determined, raging, she dropped to hands and knees, determined to crawl out if necessary.

* * *

_2-Puppets and Strings_

In the dark place on the far side of the mirror, Wanda Bailey yelped as she flipped over onto her stomach, taking Alex by surprise. He lost his hold on her hand. "Stay still! Stay still!" he yelled. He felt her—well, her butt, she was on hands and knees—and wrapped his arms around her right thigh. "Stop! Wanda, you're going the wrong way!"

"I can't help it!"

"Stand up!"

She flattened out on her stomach against the floor.

"OK, that'll work," Alex said. "Don't move!"

Trying to work his way up to take her hand again, he found himself instead working his way down her leg. "What are you doing! Stop it!"

"Don't move. Just lie still. I—I'm going to try something."

Flat on the floor himself, he started trying to move backward, toward the mirror-shape, away from Wanda.

And . . . he moved the other way instead. It was hard, hard as hell, to will himself to move the wrong way in order to go the right one. There was her back. Her shoulder. He was now all the way up even with her. She lay off to his . . . um, his right. "OK," he said. I'm putting my left hand on your right arm."

His right hand moved to her . . . left? . . . left arm.

"That's not right!" she said.

"Sh. Just grab my left hand with your right hand."

Her left closed on his right. "Everything's wrong!" she said. "Everything's crazy!"

"I know, I know. Listen. Do this and listen to yourself, OK? Count backward from ten, out loud."

"One two three four—" Alex heard Wanda's mouth actually snap shut. "What's the matter with us?"

"Try counting forward from one to ten."

"Ten nine eight—it goes the other way! Am I even awake?"

"Want me to pinch you?"

"Don't"

"I won't."

"Ouch! Keep your hands off my butt!"

"Listen, I didn't mean to! I was trying not—OK, you and me, now, don't sit up. Don't sit on the floor!"

He felt her raise up, and so did he. "I don't like this! You pinched me!"

"Slap me!"

He heard her grunt, and then in the dark she pressed her lips against his, and though the noises she was making inside her closed mouth sounded like "No, no, no," she kissed him. Right on the lips. When they broke apart, she said, "I meant to slap you!"

"Yeah, the opposite's happening. Like something's making what we want to do go the other way, and our bodies can't stop it happening. By the way, that was really nice."

"What? Oh. No, it wasn't! I didn't mean it!"

"It was my first kiss," Alex admitted.

For a moment they sat in silence. Then Wanda whispered, "You're bullshitting. I mean, you're in college—"

"Honest to God," he said. "I know it didn't mean anything to you but—well. It almost made all this insanity worth it."

"It . . . could have been worse," she said, sounding shy.

"Want to try again?"

_Smack!_

"Wow," he said appreciatively. "That was a hell of a slap!'

"Oh, my God, I'm sorry!" Wanda said. "I meant to—I was—I was going to kiss you again!"

"Hold that thought," Alex said. "Once we get out of here—"

"If we ever do!"

"Once we get out," he said, "I want to try again."

"If we do—OK," she said.

"Before we try anything else—I really like you, Wanda. Just in case we can't get out."

"Oh, we're going to get out. I'm going to kick that Bloody Mary's butt!"

"Then right now, listen and don't overthink it. Just go along with me and don't—no, I mean let go of my hand." Her grip tightened as she followed the opposite of his request. He took a deep breath. "Ready? Don't stand up."

* * *

_3-Other Side_

The furious Bloody Mary had tried to creep out, but for some reason her arms and legs had given way and she had smacked hard against the cold linoleum floor. Something touched her lips and she bit it viciously.

It wasn't a guy kissing her, but a curious mouse. She didn't eat it, but she did lick its blood from her lips. Then she sat up—

Or did she? She wanted to sit up, didn't she? She couldn't tell. The movement felt strangely involuntary. After a few moments, with a grunt, she stood up, swaying, but now the air had truly frozen around her. Try hard as she could, Mary could not put one foot in front of another. She could not take even one step away from the door behind her.

_It's the bitch I pulled through the mirror! She's back there. We're . . . tied together._

Before Bloody Mary had become the dreaded mirror ghost, demon, doppelgänger, whatever, she was a demianima. A demianima is a demon in potential—a malignant, dim intelligence, without physical form, personality, or purpose, only a strong, diffuse will to destroy and to spread dismay.

The term "demianima" is not in the dictionary, by the way. Though Alex Pines himself did not know the word or its meaning, in fact it had been coined by one Stanford Pines. Alex knew, but was not close to, his uncle Stanford. In 1995, Dr. Stanford Pines was living up in Oregon—as far as Alex knew—and working on research—as far as Alex knew—though he was actually lost in the Multiverse, having been there for thirteen years already—as far as Alex definitely did NOT know.

And he had never read it, but in Dr. Stanford Pines's first Journal, he had written a brief paragraph:

* * *

_The Greeks and Romans believed in paranormal forces, such as Elementals, that were never incarnate, not even in an ethereal form. The modern force paranormalists call a poltergeist is another example of this kind of pre-spirit. With some exceptions, poltergeists exhibit mindless malevolence, mischievousness, and stubbornness, but no real intelligence. Before they begin to toss rocks and knock on walls, what were poltergeists? How do they take on enough force and purpose to influence physical reality? I propose to call pre-existing spirits demianimas—pre-spirits if you will. My hypothesis is that such formless, aimless urges and animosities may achieve purpose and, to some extent, form from—us. They latch onto people's superstitions and beliefs and little by little shape themselves to fit expectations. Thus we collaborate in creating such things as poltergeists and such bugaboos as, say, the mirror-demon Bloody Mary. NOTE-when I have leisure from my collection of oddities in Gravity Falls, investigate more fully._

* * *

Alas, Stanford's resolution to investigate the concept came to nothing because he himself was pulled through—not a mirror, but a Portal—and was currently frantically trying to avoid a demon named Bill and to return to his home dimension.

Anyway, it's fair to say that, though there were all sorts of superstitions and beliefs about mirrors in ages past, Bloody Mary herself came into existence through a combination of these pre-existing beliefs and the willingness of young people. Somewhere, at some time, the conditions were perfect and a young boy or, more likely, girl peering into a dark mirror first spied Bloody Mary's horrible face.

And rumors and beliefs spread and became stronger. By the time people were whispering that Bloody Mary could kill people—

Well, maybe by then she could.

This much was true—though again neither Alex nor Wanda had any yay of knowing it: When _this_ Bloody Mary manifested, she was determined to get out of the mirror and to murder those responsible for calling her into existence.

For the first time, something happened that had never before occurred in the legend.

Bloody Mary had traded places with a living person. The victim was pulled into Mary's dark pocket dimension, the mirror realm.

And Bloody Mary escaped into the real world.

The two, human and demon, had changed places but still were bound together. What one did, the other was forced to do.

Puppet. Strings.

Now the battle was about to begin—the one that would decide which was the puppeteer.

* * *


	13. Two Steps Backward, One Step Forward

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**13: Two Steps Backward, One Step Forward**

_1-Tug of War_

The entity—or this entity, or at any rate, this force or being, could manifest in different forms at different places, given the right combination of fear, belief, and opportunity. This particular entity, the one named "Bloody Mary" only because that is what Becca and Selene first called her—this incarnation of Bloody Mary fought hard to escape the mirror's pull. As eventually the citizens of Gravity Falls would discover, once a disembodied intelligence gained physical form, it would not surrender that full existence without a fight.

However, having a body and existing in the physical universe carry distinct disadvantages from existence as a diffuse sentience in a realm of indeterminate state. Mirror-space is such a state—true, there's a physical component. The silvered surface of the glass does receive light from the real world and does send a major portion of it back into reality. That said, try reading a newspaper headline in the mirror. Something strange is going on.

In fact, mirrors and dreams overlap, sharing some space-time and some characteristics. Mirrors reverse things, dreams distort them—and, come to that, go to a carnival some time and stand in front of the warped mirrors. There you are, staring straight into nightmare.

When Bill Cipher (for instance) existed in the Nightmare Realm, he had no direct domination in the physical realm—he could glancingly enter it only in the dream-reality of humans, when their minds were in sleep or in trance. It was a space in which handshakes were illusory, however binding. Physical reality, when he achieved it, gave him a chance to dominate the inhabitants of the Earth, but also weakened him in crucial ways, allowing the humans to confront him. That reckoning, however, lay in the future.

At the moment, Bloody Mary was fighting unexpected forces in the real world—gravity, friction, temperature, even darkness and even air. Inside the mirror, none of that existed. Her physical body was not made of flesh but of—well, never mind, there aren't any words to describe that strange conglomeration of matter and semi-matter. However, her body still required respiration and nourishment to function.

Unused to such constraints, Bloody Mary felt her lungs, or what passed for lungs, pumping furiously and the world spun as she grew dizzy. The darkness—what _was_ darkness? In the mirror it was never dark, or if it was, it did not impede her perceptions. Now she couldn't clearly see (she was not used to having physical eyes or comprehending how they worked) and it seemed to her that some great enveloping _thing_ wrapped her, enfolded her, trapped her.

What was happening to her? What were these sensations?

She didn't know what it was, she had no word for it, but whatever darkness was, it threw her into a state of panic.

With a snarl that was almost a frightened shriek, she strained ahead a few inches, trying to reach that cross-hall, trying to reach the light, trying to find the living humans that she sensed nearby, her prey, her victims—

Their deaths, their life-forces, would sustain her, she knew instinctively. If she could reach them! Or if they would come to her!

Despite her effort to go forward, the force dragged her back, she fell hard to the floor, then felt the floor slipping away from her—she didn't understand that she, not the floor, was moving. Something dragged her backward, the direction she did not wish to take.

She spasmed in fear and fury, slammed her arms and hands against the floor, and screamed as loud as she could.

Down in the lobby, the two girls manning the ticket desk were just wrapping up, because the tickets had sold out and from then on, a campus security man would sit at the desk to check the students' hand stamps and to turn away latecomers who couldn't come in because fire code, et cetera.

The girls were packing away the cash box and the other supplies when they paused and stared at each other. "What was that?"

"Maybe we ought to go look. Sounded like—"

Inside the ballroom, DJ Eric had fired up another song, and they both relaxed. "Sounded like 'Firestorm!'" the second girl said.

They grinned and went to find Mrs. Rickard so she could lock up the cashbox in a safe room. Forget about checking what probably was just the recording, they wanted to go get into their costumes and dance with some guys! In the ballroom, the speakers boomed as Earth Crisis screamed and screamed while the metal music made the windows vibrate.

While down in the darkness, though unable to compete with hardcore punk music, in desperation and anger Bloody Mary screamed, too.

* * *

_2-What's the Problem?_

"Help me!" Wanda yelled, sounding desperately angry.

"I'm trying!" Alex said, struggling to hold onto her as she lurched and lunged, though she lay on the floor. "Here, you help, too. Don't sit up!"

Wanda did sit up, but she was still jerking and failing to control her thrashing arms. To Alex, it felt as if she were trying to box the darkness. After taking several of her blows himself on chest and cheek, he finally got hold of both of her wrists. "What's she _doing_ to me?" Wanda yelled.

Struggling to keep hold of her wrists as she jerked and pumped her arms, Alex replied, "We've got to get back through the mirror. I don't know what's making you behave like this. Maybe this—place is doing it."

She pulled hard against him but couldn't break his hold. "Get back to the mirror? Something won't let me get close to it! You try!"

"I am not going to let go of you!" Alex yelled back.

"If I get my hands on her, I'm going to—" Wanda broke off. "What are you laughing about?"

"Relief, I think! You're not crying!" Alex said. "You're mad but you're not afraid!"

"Damn right," Wanda said. "What do you think, I'm a damsel in distress? You don't even know me!"

"I'm _getting_ to know you—and I like what I'm learning about you," Alex said.

She heaved in his grip again. "Then help me! Leave me and get through the mirror if you can, then—"

"Not one chance in hell," Alex said. When Wanda struggled again against forces he could not feel or understand, he said, "Stop, I mean keep moving! Wanda, I won't try because I don't know what would happen if I managed to get through without you, and I'm not taking a chance on losing you! You promised me a dance, and I plan to collect!"

She suddenly threw herself backward, but Alex's grip on her wrists kept her from falling back and bumping her head. Alex pulled her back up, kicking to manage his balance—and his ankle clonked against something.

"Hey, hey!" he said. "I think there's a sink on this side, too! I've got a foot hooked into the pipes."

Gasping, Wanda snapped, "I don't care! Find some way to keep Bloody Mary from doing this—"

"Listen!" Alex said. "I'm going to try to drag myself toward the sink and the mirror. Listen! Don't lie down! Don't turn around so your head is toward me!"

She promptly did. "I can't get my mind around this," she said. "All turned the wrong way around—"

"Don't crawl backward!"

She lurched and strained but didn't move forward—or backward—even one inch. "I—can't—do it! It's like I'm stuck on a giant piece of flypaper, or—"

Now Alex had both his ankles locked around the S-bend pipe. "Try to resist me!"

She went limp, and he pulled. He still couldn't budge her. "You're hurting my arms," she said.

He didn't let go, but stopped tugging her, taking the pressure off. "I can't pull you. Sorry. Let's not stand up."

By then she was shaking, not with fear, but with muscular exhaustion. Alex got to his feet and helped her up as well. She said, "Now I can see the mirror—I guess. That rectangle."

"I see it, too. Wanda, I'm going to let go of your left hand—are you left-handed?"

"No."

"I am. So I'm going to hang onto your right hand with my left. Here. I'll grab your wrist, you don't grab mine. I'm going to try to get close enough to look into the mirror. Hang on tight and don't let go!" He felt her squirming and realized his mistake. "I mean—let go of my wrist! _Don't_ grab it and hold tight!"

"I hate this!" she said as her grip tightened again.

At full arm's length—both his arm and hers—Alex reached out with his free right hand and felt the edge of the sink. The pale rectangle of the mirror was two or three feet in front of him. He stared at it and, with his eyes now totally adapted to deep darkness, found he could dimly see the bathroom doorway and next to it on the wall, the square of the light-switch plate.

"Try to back away!" Alex said. "I'm close. This is the way ou—the way in!"

He heard Wanda growling in anger. "I—can't—take—a—step! There has to be a way of breaking this—spell, whatever it is!"

Alex realized Wanda couldn't approach the mirror. "Don't sit down," he said, and she promptly did. "Freak out, because I'm not going to grab both your ankles and see if I can push you further away!"

"Not OK," Wanda said, though she sounded calmer.

First with his right hand and then with his left, Alex seized her ankle. "Don't get ready. Here doesn't go!"

And he pulled.

* * *

_3-Strange Forces_

Outside, a furious and panicked Bloody Mary stood leaning forward, but not able to take a step. In the distance she heard sounds that to her were discordant cacophony, clangs and howls and screams. Music was something she did not understand, along with many other things.

And then something snagged her ankles and she fell forward, hard, hitting the floor at full force. It was even worse than the music.

Pain was yet another thing she didn't understand.

But she got a quick lesson as her chin cracked hard against the floor. Her first impulse was to jerk away from whatever held her feet, but then she kicked toward it instead, hoping to inflict on it what she felt along her whole body.

Somehow she did not connect, but as she kicked against the force, somehow she felt herself slide toward it along the floor.

And then that made her think—

Perhaps she'd been wrong.

Perhaps the key lay not in getting as far away from the mirror as possible, but approaching it.

And if she could get to it, inside was the girl who had done this to her, had pulled her out into the real world—where she wanted to be, granted—but as long as the girl inside and the creature outside existed, they were linked together, held in an invisible clutch—

She rolled over and got to her knees, then her feet.

She took a tentative step forward toward the storage-room door.

It was easy.

It was as if a magnetic force were pulling her along, giving her impetus.

She grinned wickedly, blood trickling from her lips and down her chin.

Now she understood.

She knew how to be free.

First get to the mirror.

Then kill the girl.

And then the world would be hers!

* * *


	14. Dark and Light

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**14: Dark and Light**

_1-Long Lost_

_Gravity Falls, Oregon, 9:00 PM, Saturday, October 28, 1995_

"Sixer! Stanford! Here!"

Stanley Pines woke himself up, shouting. The dream had seemed so real. His brother Stanford had been right there, wandering in darkness, right beside him—close, anyway—and—

_Damn. Another dream._

Groaning, Stanley settled back into bed, reached over, and turned on his bedside lamp. Few minutes past nine. Jeeze Louise, the nights came early way up here in Oregon. Sunset around six, full dark in another hour.

"You oughta get up, ya bum," Stanley told himself. "You got work to do."

Trouble was, he _always_ had work to do. Two jobs at once. No, three if he thought about it.

One: Keep the Mystery Shack going. To do that, he had to be an entertainer, Mr. Mystery, your jovial host. Plus the janitor, cook, bottle-washer, and, hardest of all, quantum mechanic. Oh, and add bookkeeper. But he had to keep the Shack going.

He needed the money—once a month, he had Ford's mortgage to pay, right off the top. 'Course, that wasn't so bad now. Stanley had lived in the Shack since—my God, since 1982, thirteen years! Once he'd taken up the mortgage payments, the first one a double payment, one month late because he didn't know about it until he'd received the registered letter from the bank. After reading it and finding the mortgage papers in Ford's desk, he'd very quickly realized, "This thing's a scam."

Stanford had paid a big chunk of the purchase price for the house and property as a down payment, some of that grant money he'd been given in college and that government money he'd earned doing something secretive—anyway, a government payment "for special services" came in every month and went by direct deposit straight into Stanford's bank account, which Stanley could access because Stanford had vanished without most of his ID and with none of his bankbooks or checkbooks.

But that mortgage— _oy_! Even though the original amount had been forty-five grand (and that was too much, in Stan's estimation, for a building like the Shack, though admittedly the huge and extensive basement levels would have added up to a tidy sum), the bank that held the mortgage (Northwest First Regional Bank) was charging his brother an outrageous rate of interest. And they'd front-loaded it. Back in '82 when Stanley made his first payment, a double one because of the missed month, he had examined the figures. Stanford had already paid several years on it, and the amount owed remained virtually the same. Only ten percent of the payment had gone to principal! The rest was pure interest.

Stanley could imitate his brother's signature perfectly. And fortunately. "Ford, you was robbed!" he'd grunted after endorsing that particular mortgage check and sending it in.

So he'd noodled around figures on paper. True, he wasn't a genius like his brother, but during his years, um, shall we say on the road, Stanley had learned a thing or two about such mathematical concepts as probability, odds, and calculations.

OK, so Ford had twenty-three years to go on his mortgage. That meant the Shack would be paid off in 2005. And the amount of interest would be more than the principal by a wide margin. But if . . . .

Stanley had calculated and then had paid Cal O'Leary—an elderly CPA in Gravity Falls—fifty bucks to go through the figures with him. Since that day, Stanley scrimped on other things and doubled each bank payment, with a note that the excess over the billed amount was to apply exclusively to principal. "This way," old Cal had said, "you'll own your house free and clear by 1996."

That had seemed such a long way off in 1983. In 1983, Stanley was certain that Stanford would return any time now. Certainly before the new decade. And he wanted his brother to be pleased that he'd been a good steward, that he'd taken care of the property, had looked out for . . . Ford's . . ..

"Ah, crap." On that October evening in 1995, Stanley asked himself, "Who'm I kidding? If I get him back—" His heart pounded, and he corrected: " _When_ I get him back, he'll still be mad at me. I can't blame him. I screwed up again."

_I should get up and go to work._

But Saturdays were long days and hard, the Shack's biggest business day of the week, and the weather was already turning cold, so soon he'd have to close down for the winter. No more dough coming in from the rubes. He'd have to watch his savings, stretch dimes to pay the mortgage and have enough eating money to last until the April thaw.

Nothing extra for buying arcane scientific equipment. Plenty of free time to work on fixing the cockamamie machine down in the basement, but no extra dough for parts. Anyhow, he'd had a good day in the Shack, a long one, herding tourists through, selling tchotchkes, spinning his tall tales, even getting tips from more than half of the marks. Most days, he could grab a couple hours of sleep and then go down in the basement and futz around disassembling and rebuilding levers and electronics until morning, but tonight he was bone-weary.

"I'm gettin' old," he muttered.

Come on, now. Forty? That wasn't _old._

"It ain't young," Stanley muttered.

He closed his eyes and tried to catch the dream again. Stanford had been right there, in the dark, and _he_ looked young. Like he had when he was a senior in high school, all those years ago. Glasses, too skinny, hair messy, the whole bit.

"Wait," Stanley told himself. Something was off. What was it?

He had a good memory for images, and it came to him at last: the Pines cowlicks were on the wrong side. On Ford, they flopped to the right. But he'd seen Stanford with them flopping to the left instead. Like a mirror image.

"Five fingers!" he said, swinging out of bed. "Damn! He had five fingers on each hand! It wasn't Ford—it was _me_. No, it wasn't. I'd know me! Couldn't have been Shermy. Shermy takes after Ma, not Pop."

He went to the bathroom and turned on the light and stared at his face in the mirror. Huh. The dream-Stanford had looked like a younger him, but somehow also not like him, and not like Stanley, either. It was like—

"Am I dreamin' of the past?" he asked his reflection.

It didn't answer.

"I got a bad feelin'," Stanley said. "Hang on, Brother. I'm workin' on gettin' to you. I'll have you back before you know it."

Stanley couldn't quite understand—perhaps Stanford could—that the dream dimension and the mirror realm overlap.

Stanley went back to bed, already knowing that sleep wouldn't come for hours. He prepared for a long bout of wrestling with doubt and worry, still wondering about that dream vision of—of Stanford?

He didn't know how nearly right he was, even though he was totally wrong.

Anyway—for what reason he couldn't say, because though he had got used to the bizarre critters and even some of the haunts of Gravity Falls, and he wasn't afraid of the dark (in fact, the things in the dark were learning to be afraid of Stanley)—even so, he left the bathroom light on.

It shone directly into the mirror.

* * *

_2-A Little Light Music_

In the pitch-dark room where Wanda and Alex struggled, for some reason there was a little more light. No. More accurately, it was marginally less dark.

In the same way that all sizable libraries are connected, because words are magical, books are full of words, and a collection of books warps the space-time continuum in ways that only orangutans can fully understand, all mirrors are windows into the reversed domain of reflections. It isn't a physical connection, exactly, but a kind of resonance.

The light in Stanley's bathroom, six hundred miles away, very, very faintly shone into the mirror in the storeroom bathroom. Anyway, something made the faint, glimmering candlelit rectangle grow somewhat brighter.

Why that should happen, why the connection between those mirrors was strong enough—well, the Pines family, under everything, had a strong bond. The mirror world reflected the dream world. In Stanley's troubled sleep, he thought he'd seen his brother as he'd looked at the age of eighteen. He'd seen . . . his nephew instead. Neither of them would ever realize that, but the dream glimpse was enough to string the wires, so to speak. Now a bit of Stanley's mirror leaked into their surroundings. Not enough to make a physical connection, but enough to offer a bit of light, a bit of hope.

And at the moment of the dream, Alex had, just for a fleeting heartbeat, felt as though someone were calling him. Calling him by the wrong name, but still. He had just taken his folded horn-rimmed spectacles from inside the chimney-sweep jacket's inner pocket and put them on. Normally he wore them only for reading, but straining to see anything in the darkness, why not don them? And not long after that, he'd noticed the rectangle of light brightening perceptibly.

"Hey, I can see you!" he told Wanda.

"I can barely see you," Wanda said. It was still too dark for him to read her expression, but she sounded exasperated. "I still can't go toward the mirror!"

"I think I can," Alex said. "Maybe it's because Bloody Mary had hold of you when she dragged you in here. I'm just extra. Dead weight. The, what, magic, whatever doesn't work as much on me. So—you won't like this."

He could tell she was staring at him, though he knew she could no more make out his features than he could hers. She asked, "What?"

Taking a deep breath, Alex said, "I think maybe you can get to the mirror, but you won't like it because—well, it probably won't work anyway."

"What?" she all but yelled at him. "Shut up and tell me!"

He didn't pause to point out how contradictory the orders were. "OK," he said. "I have to pick you up and carry you."

"Shit!"

"No, it's not an excuse to get my hands on you. Look, if I can just carry you to the mirror, you can—"

She cut him off: "Did I say I didn't want to do it?"

"No, you said—"

"I know what I said! How do we do this?"

That flummoxed Alex. "Uh—hasn't a guy ever picked you up before?"

"No! What kind of girl do you think I am?"

He hurriedly backtracked, though as a matter of fact he had never picked up a girl, either—in any sense of the word. "Sorry, sorry, no offense intended. OK, like a groom carries a bride, all right? Put your arm around my neck and hold on. I put one arm around your back and the other under your knees."

She warned, "You won't be able to hold me."

Trying to sound confident, he reassured her: "I'm stronger than I look."

"You'd have to be!"

"Come on, let me at least try."

She grudgingly put her arm around his neck and tightened it. He bent his knees, took hold of her, and then straightened up. "Don't drop me!" she warned.

"Nothing to it," he said with a grunt. "Let's see if this will work."

They were, he supposed, ten feet away from the mirror. He took a step toward it. More than gravity pulled at him—as if he were webbed to something behind him. But he took two more steps. Now he stood maybe only five feet away, and he could see the dim outlines of the bathroom door and light switch in the fading flickering light of the fallen candle.

"Listen!" Wanda said. "You hear that?"

Faint music, not enough to follow the tune. "Sounds like metal," he grunted.

"That's the dance! Take another step! You're doing it!" Wanda said.

"You smell very nice," he told her.

"Think so? Well, you use too much cologne."

"I know," he admitted. Another step. Wanda seemed to be growing heavier, but now he could feel the regular percussive beat, and they were almost to the sink. In fact, he bumped against it with the next forward step. "How are you doing?"

"I'm OK. Am I too—"

"No, I got you—the sink's right here, just under your, um, butt. Can—can you lean forward? If you can pull yourself through the mirror, I think I can come out after you."

"I'll try. Wait. If we get out, don't look at me. I'm nearly half naked."

Damn, his arms were going to give out any second. "I'll give you my jacket and you can tie the arms around your waist or something," he gasped. "Here you go."

Alex strained to hold her, to help her lean toward the mirror, knowing it was solid, not permeable. _This is crazy, this is stupid, going through a mirror like it was an open window, even I don't believe this_.

Wanda leaned, one arm down, finding the sink, bracing on it, her face coming nearer and nearer to the mirror, now only inches away—

Bloody Mary reared on the other side, snarling, snaggle-toothed mouth drooling blood, red eyes glaring, clawed hands stretching out.

"Oh, shit!" Alex said.

* * *


	15. In and Out

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**15: In and Out**

_1-Confrontation_

"Bitch!" Wanda screamed as one of those loathsome claws closed on her arm.

The next moment flashed past so fast that it took her a moment to realize what happened. She felt Alex leaning on her, for an instant thought he was trying to shove her through without seeing the monstrous figure that had caught her—then she heard the crunch and the outraged shriek and felt the claw lose its grip.

Alex hauled her back. "Get away from—I mean go toward! Go toward her!"

"What did you do?" Wanda asked as, holding onto each other, they staggered back.

"I think I may have broken my hand," he said, shaking his right one.

"You _punched_ her?"

"Remember my first kiss? This was another first, only it wasn't as nice. I never punched any—wait, what's she doing?"

The glimmer of mirror was blocked out momentarily.

"She's coming through!" Wanda said. "She's coming into the mirror!"

In a moment, she was more in than out, still waist-deep in the mirror, but her head and torso inside, her freaky long arms spread out, bony hands braced on the sinks. Alex slapped at the wall switch and the lights came on. Watching Bloody Mary as her head reared back, impossibly far, her neck practically bent double so she could leer at them, Alex thought _I preferred it dark!_

At least now he could see the door out, into the mirror version of the storage room. He groped for the handle, missed it, realized _Mirror! It's on the left in here, not the right!_

He shoved, then yanked, and they got through the door. "This is wrong!" Wanda shouted.

Alex didn't see much of the room, but what he did see told him Wanda was right. Where were all the steel shelves, the stacks of supplies? This was—a moldy cave of a room, empty except for sagging strands of dusty cobwebs, and underfoot was a disgustingly squashy surface studded with toadstools. But he hustled Wanda, who now didn't seem to be controlled by an outside force, across the yielding, spongy floor to the door. He got her through there—

And now they were in a degraded, decaying version of the short hallway. A little light spilled from the cross-hall.

They ran toward the light, but heard no sound of music. Evidently here there was no DJ, no dance. The left-side wall— _The real one's on the right,_ Alex thought—was almost all windows, looking out onto a dark night, and—

"There she is!" Wanda yelled.

Bloody Mary, on all fours, scuttled through the row of windows—or her reflection did. "She's stuck in the glass, I think!" Wanda said. "The windows are like half-mirrors!"

"Could we go through?" Alex asked.

"How the hell should I know? But she's there, in the glass! Stay away from her!"

They reached the lobby, or a weird parody of it. Here the floor felt even worse, a liquid the consistency of thick mud, but sticky, like melting asphalt. The ceiling sagged like the fabric of a collapsing tent, the overhead lights melting, drooling down slowly, though they still glowed. "Mirrors," Alex said. "Any other mirrors in this place?"

"Girls' room!" Wanda said. "This way!"

They got through the door and into another dark room—but here four large mirrors glowed with light. A couple of girls were staring at them—no, at their own reflections—applying lipstick and adjusting costumes. Wanda ran to one girl she recognized. "Anna! Help!"

But Anna obviously didn't hear. She said something to the girl beside her, they both laughed, and then the two girls turned their backs and left. "What is she?" Alex asked.

"What?"

Anna's costume. What's she supposed to—"

"I think it's Eeyore, but—let's go through!"

However—

The glass here was solid, not soft, and they couldn't get through it. Alex, going by the position of the light switch in the real world, found the one on this side and switched it on.

The lights in the reflected room came on, but the ones in the real one simultaneously went out.

"Try now!" Alex yelled, but a girl in the real bathroom turned on their lights, and the ones on this side went out.

"Damn!" Wanda said as Bloody Mary's hand appeared in the rightmost mirror, reaching through to grasp the frame. "Here she is! Run!"

Out again, and they ducked into the ballroom, all dark and deserted, of course, on this side, in the mirror universe.

"Maybe she can't see us if we're somewhere there's no mirrors," Alex said in the hallway. They tried some doorways, but they were either locked or nonexistent—they saw what looked like a door, but it was a _trompe-l'oeil_ representation of one, the knob only a picture, not the real thing.

"Let's try the guys' room," Alex said.

"It'd be the same as the girls' room—"

"Maybe not. The lights in there are motion-sensitive."

"What?"

"Guys are lazy, I guess," he said. "Come on."

Back around the corner, past the girls' room, and then into the boys'.

Ah-ha! Here the lights were on in the mirror world, off in the real room. "Get against the mirror and lean on it!" Alex said. "I'm going to try something."

"Don't leave me!"

"I'm not, I'm just trying something. Don't let yourself fall if this works, but get through!"

"Leave you?"

"I'll be OK. She's not after me. Now! Press on the mirror, but freeze."

Alex flicked the light switch.

Nothing happened.

"Gah!" he yelled.

Wait, wait. On the far side, the lights came on when someone opened the door and went past the sensors. So here—

He started doing jumping-jacks, leaping, swinging his arms—

The lights went off. Now both rooms were dark—

"Eep!"

Something happened in the darkness. A moment later, the lights in the boys' room, the real one, came on, and Alex saw Wanda pick herself up and turn and look wildly back.

And then from the next mirror over, a long bony arm stretched out, and then the horrific form of Bloody Mary plunged through, into the real world.

Wanda, in her costume top but shoeless and skirtless in light-gray tights, dashed out the door. Bloody Mary scrambled after her.

Alex ran to the mirror.

Solid again.

_Damn._

"I'm coming!" he yelled, knowing that Wanda couldn't hear him, and not knowing how he was going to get to her.

* * *

_2-Chase_

Wanda ran into the hallway, startling a couple of freshmen who were going to the restroom. "Whoa, dude!" one said as she ran past. "Is that like a dude?"

"Must be a dude dressed like a girl," the other one said.

"Whatever, he's got bitchin' legs!"

"Whoa!"

This last expression erupted as a skeletal-thin, bloody-faced apparition with long straggling black hair, a gaping mouth with yellowed, crusted fangs, and ragged clothes—except for a rather nice long skirt—came scuttling out, bent over, like a freakish mutation half between a giant spider and a person, shoved the two aside as it ran past them.

"Seriously rude, dude!" the first guy yelled.

"Damn, dude, that's a good costume," the second one said. He was Batman, in a cheap costume and plastic mask way.

"Yeah, I guess we can kiss off winning the prize," the second, a threadbare Superman with a cape that came only down to the small of his back, said. "Dude, this dance seriously sucks."

"Yeah," Batman agreed. They had come stag, and no girl had danced with either of them more than once. "Maybe we shouldn't've bought our costumes from the five and dime."

"Whatever. Let's take a leak and split. I got some grass in the car."

"Super, man."

"Shut up, you dork."

"You're a dork."

"You're a dong!"

"Your mama says I got the biggest dong—"

They went in to pee, still insulting each other. The night was looking better to them.

* * *

_3-Mazed_

Alex was scared. Terrified, even. He knew that Wanda needed him, and he had no way of getting to her—

Unless—

"The first mirror," he told himself. "Now maybe I can get through it, if both Wanda and Bloody Mary are on the other side."

Yeah, that made sense.

Well, no, it made no sense at all, but he had to try _something_.

But somehow the mirror-universe student center was shifting, as if aware of him and trying to delay him. Dark hallways led off to left and right, dead-ends, not real. It was like being caught in an architectural dream—in English class, the students had read an old essay, _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,_ in which the author had described how, in drug-warped dreams, buildings became utterly unfamiliar. They unfolded, or duplicated, or grew to terrifying scale, so the dreamer was lost as if in a maze, with no way out.

Alex started to think he knew what—what was his name? De Quincey—was writing about. He tried to force himself to think clearly. What should he look for? How could he even look, in such darkness?

But wait. Something odd—nothing was in complete darkness, not now. Maybe his eyes had adjusted. A strange, reddish glow barely gave him a sense of where walls were, wrong though they were. It was like—he could almost remember something like this—

Oh, right—the Nocturnal exhibit at the zoo! There everything was lit with a dim red light, because the animals normally active at night couldn't see the wavelength of red light. Humans could, so by walking through and looking into the various compartments they could get glimpses of animals normally awake at night going about their business. The fruit bats, he remembered, crept around or fluttered across the enclosure.

Which made him worry about bats, darn it. In Scouts he'd learned something about getting out of a maze. "Put your hand on one wall, to your left or right, it doesn't matter, but follow that wall through every turning, even if the turn is a dead end and sends you back the way you came. As long as you don't take your hand off, you'll get out eventually."

He tried that, feeling that like de Quincey he was lost in a drugged dream—another symptom de Quincey had written about was the impression that an intolerable span of time passed in such terrifying dreams.

At last he saw the subdued dim blue glow of lights and came out in the deteriorating cross hall. The ceiling had sagged even more, and he had to practically fold himself double to get through the hallway.

Cross-hall. He tried the light switch, and a faint dim glow greeted him. Then into and across the toadstool-crowded storage room, into the bathroom. Here the lights worked. In the mirror-world inversion of the real-world bathroom, the walls looked damp and crumbly, with a network of roots clinging to them, moisture dripping from them. The mirror, though—with light on this side and only a dying candle on the other, the mirror might be dark enough.

He pressed against it.

Nope. Solid.

He turned off the light, dreading the dark.

He felt his way back to the dim yellow rectangle of the mirror.

Pushed his hand against it—

And it sank in. It felt as if he were trying to shove his hand through a sheet of tough stretchy, rubbery plastic, but—

He got a knee on the sink and hoped it wouldn't collapse under his weight.

His hand went all the way through, and he reached down to brace himself on the sink on the real side—ouch!

The horizontal candle, the flame now having eaten halfway through its side, was still burning, and he had nearly stuck his palm down in the hot wax and the flame. He reached farther and grabbed the outer edge of the sink, strained and pulled—

He fell to the floor, barely clearing the sink. Immediately he scrambled up and turned on the lights. Now the mirror was just a mirror—no darkness, just his own reflection.

The candle was so melted that he turned on the cold water to extinguish it and harden it. He picked it up. The molten wax had puddled and partly dripped into the drain, but he pulled as much of it as he could out and tossed the candle into the waste can—nearly full of paper towels dating back maybe months, because the room apparently got cleaned only rarely.

He could hear the bass thrum of music.

OK, he was back.

He took off his reading glasses, folded them, and tucked them into his inside jacket pocket.

_Let's go find Wanda._

_And perhaps Bloody Mary._

_Who might kill me._

Heck with it, he thought. Wanda was worth the risk.

* * *


	16. Stalking

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**16: Stalking**

_1-Come Out, Come Out_

Bloody Mary could see clearly only when a mirror or mirror-like surface helped her. Otherwise, she wandered in—not darkness, but the opposite of darkness. No, that would be light—say in a luminescent fog that blurred everything.

She couldn't follow Wanda by scent—the mirror dimension had not given her ordinary senses, except for vision and hearing (admittedly, attuned to higher frequencies; bass was lost on her, but treble came in sharp as razors in the ear). Smell, no, taste, no.

Now she had seen Wanda dash out of the doors of the Student Center—the doors, propped open to let in cool night air, held huge panes of glass, and these had caught Wanda's reflection. Outside, though—

No mirrors here to help Bloody Mary, only the chrome of automobiles. Because the campus street and parking lot lighting came from high-pressure sodium vapor lamps, the thousands of building windows reflected almost nothing, giving her no aid. Worse, the yellow light streaming down, making the night-time campus bright for students, instead flooded the world with a glowing yellow fog for her, hiding almost everything.

Just outside the open doorway, Bloody Mary found a tall metal lamppost and climbed it with the agility of a spider monkey. Near the top, she hung on with one hand and both feet, leaning far out and shading her eyes from the most intense source of light, trying to survey the ground. She barely saw anything. Nothing sedentary attracted her attention—bushes and flower beds and parked cars might as well have been invisible. She was on the lookout for movement.

She saw something moving, leaped, and landed beside it. It screeched and backed away, swelling.

It was Nameless, one of the campus cats. They were mostly feral, though neutered and vaccinated against basic feline diseases—Maintenance did a roundup every so often, and the Veterinary Science School took care of the treatments. They were released into the wild (college campuses can be pretty wild) and kept the rodent population under control.

Nameless was a gray, black, and white spotted tabby, a four-pound leopard, and she sensed that this thing from the sky was something alien, nothing to be toyed with. Bloody Mary tried to scoop her up, but like so many humans pursuing their own escaped and wandering pet kitty, she missed as Nameless did the old vanishing trick, essentially running backwards between her own hind legs and into the bushes, where she crouched to become still and invisible to mirror demons.

Bloody Mary could tell that whatever this thing was, it wasn't a girl. She wanted a girl—Selene, the summoner, for preference, or Becca, but Wanda was closest and would do. However, Wanda had the advantage of having shed the long skirt. Bloody Mary pulled it off and dropped it. She was basically naked, though that didn't much matter. She was as sexless as an income-tax form.

What Nameless, from her hiding place, saw, was a hunched humanoid _thing_ that only superficially resembled the college students who now and then tossed her a piece of a hamburger or opened a can of sardines for her. This—thing's—arms and legs were too long, too strangely jointed, the feet and hands taloned. The neck stretched too far, the spine showed like a ridge of desert mountains, so sharp that it threatened to sprout spikes. The hair hung in dangling matted locks, the mouth gaped, the eyes glared.

Nameless the Brave watched but, through cat instinct, did not stir. The number one rule for cats was _if it doesn't notice you, don't move._ Number two was _climb a tree._ With any luck she wouldn't need to get as far down the list as _puke a hairball on it._

Leaving the crumpled skirt in a small heap, Bloody Mary roamed the parking lot, car to car, seeing a little more clearly as she passed wing mirrors. Still not seeing Wanda.

Something moved inside one car. She dropped to all floors and scrabbled toward it like a demon crab. Then she reared up, ready to smash through the windows and grab Wanda—

The rear-view gave her a vision boost. The only things in the car were boys, and Bloody Mary had zero interest in boys. No boy had summoned her. Her hunting skills were honed for the female of the species. But she flattened her face against the passenger-side window, hideous eyes aflame, rotting nose pressed to the glass, mouth open, tongue lolling and drooling bloody saliva, hands spread out on the glass.

One of the two guys inside the car had just drawn in a lungful of smoke. He turned and stared into the eyes of something that might have come hot from hell.

And he laughed. "Primo grass, dude!" he said, giggling like an idiot.

The driver started the engine and rolled down the window. "Wanna go for a ride, babe?"

Bloody Mary sprang back with a sharp hiss.

The passenger laughed like a loon. "She thinks you're too ugly, dude!"

"Your mom's too ugly!"

The two guys collapsed in laughter. The passenger was right—his buddy had scored some pretty high-grade weed. At that moment they would have found a cantaloupe funny, and a cucumber would have been hilarious.

Bloody Mary left them. Just because she was a demon from the most terrifying space behind the mirror didn't mean she had no taste.

Something was moving, on the far side of the parking lot, away from the Student Center. Dropping down again, Bloody Mary scuttled toward it with a sound like dry rat's bones clattering on desert rocks.

* * *

_2-Wherever You Are_

The campus cop on duty at the desk told Alex, "Yeah, couple of girls left. Saw them run out the door over there." He had to bellow to be heard over the pulsating music.

"What were they wearing?"

"Who notices?" the cop asked. "Second one looked like a zombie, I guess. First one had like a blouse and vest deal and looked like real tight jeans."

"Thanks!" Alex said.

He ran outside and stopped to look around. Something rustled off to his left. "Wanda?" he asked in as loud a whisper as he dared try.

A cat meowed at him.

Her ran to the sidewalk—left, right, or straight ahead, which way? At the base of a streetlight, something lay crumpled on the ground—Mary Poppins's long skirt. He snatched it up, tossed it so it draped over his shoulder. That meant Bloody Mary had come this way—but why had she dropped the skirt?

He heard something from the parking lot—a strange giggling sound. He ran toward it and found two stoners who reacted to his question by going into hysterics.

Desperate times, desperate measures. He climbed onto the hood of their car and found a place that would hold his weight. He stood on it and did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visual sweep. The night was clear, the lights bright, but nothing moved—wait. Something moved, over there, on the far side of the lot—something unnatural.

He jumped off the car and ran.

"Now," the passenger said, " _that_ was Superman! He went flying away, zoooooooommmmm."

"Zoooooooooommm!" the driver agreed.

That was so funny they zoomed together, harmonizing until they got so loud that a campus security man stopped his car and came over to see what was up.

"Hello, boys," he said, leaning in through the open passenger-side window.

"Have a toke," the passenger said generously.

Next day, in retrospect, it didn't seem as funny as it had on the spur of the moment.

* * *

Becca and Selene had long since returned to their dorm. They were in Becca's room, trying to calm down. "It wasn't real," Becca said, sounding completely uncertain. "It couldn't have been real."

"It was scary," Selene said. "Like something in hell."

"Some kind of hallucination. Illusion. Couldn't be real. There's nothing real like that," Becca said, nearly babbling. She took a deep breath, trying to get hold of herself.

"Real or not, it was awful. Like something out of hell," Selene repeated. She blew her nose. Her makeup was a mess, and Becca thought hers probably was, too. "What do we do, what do we do?" Selene asked.

"I'm not going back to the dance," Becca said.

"Your boyfriend will miss you."

"He'll call if he does. But I'm not going back."

"Me, either." Selene bit her lip. "Listen, should—should we tell somebody? Mrs. Rickard, or, or, I don't know, somebody?"

"They'd just think we were crazy or something. Nobody would believe us. Hell, I wouldn't believe it if I hadn't been there," Becca said.

"No," said Selene, not in disagreement, but assenting.

Becca sighed. "Let me change clothes. You want to go to your room and get out of your costume—"

"I'll wait," Selene said. After a moment, in a small voice she added, "You go with me?" her tone made it a question.

"Sure. Let me change first."

She got into a blue tee-shirt and jeans and then went to check her make-up.

In the big mirror on the back of the dorm-room door. Almost like a door in itself, leading to somewhere else.

Just an ordinary mirror.

A mirror.

* * *


	17. Up Against It

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**17: Up Against It**

_1-Seeking Wanda_

Alex reasoned that Wanda, once away from the Student Center, would most likely head for her dormitory. That was where he headed—keeping an eye out for Bloody Mary. Every rustle of a bush in the wind, every gleam of a high-flying plane made him crouch and stare. But he got across the campus without spotting either Wanda or her nemesis.

And then in the lobby—of course there was a Security woman on the desk, barring the way—Alex called Wanda's room and got no answer. Damn! What to do, what to do.

Well—he had an uncle who had once been a researcher into paranormal crap, or so he'd been told. He took out his wallet, found his miniature phonebook—home-made, only a few pages long, and printed in eight-point type—and found "Uncle Stanford, 618 Gopher Road, Gravity Falls," then the zip code and telephone number.

It wasn't a pay phone, and in his costume he didn't have change anyway, so it had to be an operator-assisted call. He told the woman that he wanted to make a collect call and read in Stanford's phone number. He heard the number ring, then Stanford, sounding groggy, answered: "Yeah, Pines residence."

"I have a collect call for Stanford Pines from Alex Pines. Will you accept the charges?"

Immediately more alert, his uncle said, "Right, sure. Put him through."

"Go ahead with your call," the operator said.

"Hi, Uncle Stanford," Alex said. "Uh—I'm having some trouble."

"How much you need, kid?" the gravelly voice asked.

"No, not money. Uh—you researched things like ghosts and demons, right?" He had lowered his voice. No one was in the lobby, but across the room at the desk the Security officer was leafing through a magazine.

After a pause, his uncle said, "That was a long time ago, before I, uh, retired, and I'm not sure I remember—"

"Mirror demons," Alex said. "I need to know about mirror demons."

"Huh. I—wait a minute, kid. I'm gonna go into the office. Don't hang up, I'll pick up there."

Alex fidgeted, worrying about the long-distance charges this was racking up. Then he heard the rattle of the phone as his uncle picked up the receiver in his office. "You there, kid?"

"I'm here. I'll pay for this call, I just didn't—"

"It's OK, kid, it's family. All right, I, uh, I kept a journal of my researches and I think I saw—I mean I think I remember writing something about demons and stuff in there. Why aren't these pages numbered? Where was it, where was it? OK, OK, let me read this to you. This is all I can tell you."

Alex didn't even have a pocket notebook to take notes, but he tried his best to remember:

* * *

_If the Multiverse theory is true, as my researches have led me to think it is, perhaps the proof may be found in a startlingly mu—what the heck? Mun-dane. Mundane locus, who writes stuff like this? Mundane locus, namely in what I have termed the Mirror Universe. I have collected more than a thousand anecdotes of what I may term mirror anomalies. They suggest that, under certain circumstances mirrors may afford us glimpses into a slightly alternate universe, perhaps a limited pocket realm. I dunno what he—uh, I meant by that one, kid, too long ago, I guess. Anyways, let's see: Should one enter the mirror universe, it would be crucial to avoid one's own double, because should one touch the other, instant an—uh, annihilation? Yeah. Would occur._

* * *

After a moment of silence, Alex's uncle said, "That's all there is, kid. I hope it helps. What's goin' on, anyways?"

Someone lightly tapped on the door, and looking around, Alex saw Wanda, crouching outside. "Thanks, Uncle Stanford. I'll talk to you later, and I'll pay for the call. Bye!" He hung up and hurried outside.

No one there. "Where are you?" he whisper-called.

"Over here, behind the bush! I'm half-naked!"

"I have your skirt!"

They found each other, and surprisingly, she hugged him. "I've been so scared! She's out there, Alex—and I think she's hunting me!"

"Here's your, um, clothes. Skirt, I mean," he said. "I'll turn my back."

He heard the rustle of clothing, and then she said, "OK, I'm decent."

"What are we going to do?" he asked.

"The first thing," she said grimly, "is to find Becca and Selene. They started this!"

They went in together, and Wanda called Becca's room. No answer. She tried Selene's.

"Hello?"

"Is Becca with you?" demanded Wanda.

"Uh, y-yes."

"Both of you stay right where you are!" Wanda said.

Alex said, "Don't look in a mirror."

"What?" Wanda asked.

Alex repeated, and Wanda said into the phone: "Keep away from the mirror! And stay where you are!"

She hung up as if angry, but before she could stride away, Alex grabbed her arm. "I need to be there, too," he said.

"You can't—"

"You may need help," he told her.

She looked into his eyes. "Damn it," she muttered. "OK. Around back, the door beside the dumpster. Hurry! And if we get caught—we'll both be expelled."

"I think we have to risk it," he said.

"Go."

* * *

_2-A Way In_

All across the campus, mirrors in turn darkened as Bloody Mary used them as a means of transportation. She did not go into the mirrors—rather she gleamed off the surface of them, now an auto wing mirror, now a particularly reflective windowpane. She had lost her sense of where the girls, Selene, Becca, and especially Wanda, were.

But she would find them. She didn't know about daylight. She had never come out in the day, had never so much as glimpsed the sun. Darkness, though—darkness she knew.

Never before had she been outside her own realm—in the real world and out of the mirror realm—and she felt herself steadily weakening. Perhaps the yellow glare of the campus lights had something to do with that.

She needed to find Wanda, or Becca, or—best of all, if she could do it—Selene. Find one of them and destroy her, take in her life-energy. But that had to be done soon.

She didn't know it, but that meant before sunup.

Casting her senses out—radar for a victim, a kind of tingling in the perceptions—she first felt the others fading away, and then she happened across a hint of Wanda's passing nearby. Like a dog casting backward and forward, she found and followed the track.

It led in darts left and right, into shadowed niches and doorways. And then, finally, to the dormitory, to the hedge running along the front, to the spot near the door where Wanda had stood for long minutes, trying to find a way in.

She had just been here.

She had gone inside, no more than five minutes before. The door was glass, reinforced with a crisscross of wire, but it was barely reflective enough to allow Bloody Mary to . . . seep through.

One moment she was outside, the next inside.

She sensed that Wanda had gone upwards—and she set out to find the stairs.

"Hey!" the woman in uniform said from the desk. "Sign in!"

Bloody Mary stalked toward her. The woman spun an open book and thrust it toward her. She held out a pen. "Sign in!"

Though she could not read, in some occult way, Bloody Mary sensed that the most recent signature belonged to Wanda. She vaguely grasped the notion of making marks on the next blank line, and with the pen she made a scrawl in two parts, not copying Wanda's name, but just making a jagged, loopy scribble that might have been a name. The woman at the desk, more interested in her magazine than in students, had already settled back in her chair, reading the article.

Past her desk, Bloody Mary followed the—scent? The spoor? The trace of Wanda that she had sensed into a stairwell. Dropping to all fours, the specter began to crawl up the steps, head low, swaying, seeking to find Wanda's trail.

* * *

"He shouldn't be here!" Selene said, her voice quavering.

"Shut up!" Wanda snapped. "What did you two do?"

Becca had retreated into sullenness. "It was just a stupid game," she muttered. "I didn't think anything would happen."

"I think," Alex said, "that the two of you somehow contacted a—uh, I know this sounds stupid—an alternate universe?"

"What does that even mean?" Becca asked.

"It means you let some kind of monster loose!" Wanda said. "She grabbed me and pulled me into the mirror! Stop smirking! And Alex helped me get out again!"

"Listen, listen," Alex said, though with the dance going on, the floor was almost totally vacant and there was no one there to hear. "The thing we've got to do is find out how to get rid of Bloody Mary. Anybody know anything about banishing Bloody Mary?"

Shifting and looking pouty, Becca said slowly, "I've heard some girls say you draw a cross on each mirror in the place with a bar of soap. And you sprinkle salt on the floor. She hates soap and salt. And one girl said if you sprinkle vinegar on your clothes, she can't touch you."

"Guess we have to go to the corner store," Alex said.

"And I think we have to take the stuff back to the bathroom where she appeared," Wanda added.

Selene began to shake. "I can't, I can't!"

"We'll all go with you," Alex said. "We have to try something."

It took some persuading, but finally they got Selene and Becca to agree. "We've got an hour and a half before the dance is over," Alex said. "We'll have to move fast. Or—soap's easy, everybody has soap, but salt and vinegar—"

"The kitchen," Becca said, still sounding reluctant. "Everybody keeps stuff in the cabinet there. I know there's some salt packets and there's a cardboard box of ketchup and mayo and stuff like that. Maybe some vinegar, too."

"OK, you guys stop there," Alex said. "Collect it. I have to go down by the back stairway and sneak out without the alarm going off. Meet you out front in five minutes."

Wanda took Selene's arm and all but wrestled her into the hallway. As the girls went into the common kitchen on that floor, Alex cautiously opened the stairway and stepped out on the landing.

His first impression was that a large dog had slipped in and crouched halfway down the top flight of stairs. Then the head snapped up, the eyes glared, and he threw himself back into the hallway, slamming the door. "She's here!" he yelled, not caring if everyone could hear him.

Wanda ran from the kitchen. "Where?"

"Stairs!" he said.

"Move! Alex, move!" Wanda grabbed his hand and yanked him away from the closed stairway door.

He stumbled. Looking back, he saw something seeping under the door, like a pool of dark oil.

Except it wasn't oil. And it wasn't a shadow.

The mirror demon had impossibly flattened and was slipping into the hallway.

They were trapped.

* * *


	18. Cornered

**Mirror, rorriM**

_(Autumn 1995)_

* * *

**18: Cornered**

The flow on the floor was neither gas nor liquid, but somewhere in between. Black and shiny, its surface began to gleam with hints of red and white as it rippled and bubbled. The center of the weird puddle swelled and surged, a face half-formed, one bloodshot eye bulging to the size of a baseball, a mouth gaping with a blackened tongue protruding between rows of jagged teeth.

As it roiled, the pool moved, gliding fully beneath the door and into the hall. Wanda had retreated to the communal kitchen, and Alex backed down the hall as the eerie form of Bloody Mary coalesced from the surging pool, rose dripping, head lowered, baleful orange eyes glowing from under lowered brows. She tried to take a step, but the leg had not solidified, and it collapsed, making her fall through the pool up to her waist. With a snarl, she began to rise again.

Alex heard running footsteps and looked back over her shoulder. Wanda was running toward him, fists clenched. "Get back—" Alex yelled.

Wanda passed him, and he hooked an arm around her waist. "She's too fast!"

With a grunt, Wanda swung her arm and threw something invisible.

Whatever it was struck Bloody Mary in the face and upper chest—and holes bloomed on her skin, dribbling greenish-black liquid, thick as syrup, each cavity spreading and deepening, riddling her face until it looked like ancient, spoiled, moldy Swiss cheese. Screaming, she collapsed to the floor, liquefying again.

"What did you—" Alex began.

Wanda snapped, "Salt!"

The bubbling pool fizzed and sizzled, boiling up and collapsing again and again—and when it couldn't take shape, it oozed forward. "It didn't kill her," Alex said. "Is there another way downstairs?"

"Fire stairs, end of the hall, but we'd set off an alarm!"

Before the turgid, seething mess on the floor could take human shape again, they rushed to Selene's room. Wanda pounded on the door. "Let us in! It's us!"

Gazing back down the hall, to where the black glob was finally growing to human size again, Alex yelled, "Got any more salt?"

Wanda fumbled in her jacket pocket and produced six packets. She tore three of them open, he ripped the other three, and they scattered the salt in the hall outside the door, he saving one packet until the door opened and Wanda pushed in. "What?" Becca asked.

After sprinkling the last bit of salt along the threshold, Alex followed Wanda in, then closed and bolted the door. "She's out there," he said. "She somehow got into the dorm." He pressed his cheek against the door to peer through the peephole. He saw a fish-eye distorted version of the hallway—but not enough to see Bloody Mary, who had still been trying to reform herself down the hall, near the central stairway.

"Let's call somebody!" Selene said, her voice jagging on the ragged edge of hysteria. "Security!"

To Alex's surprise, Wanda snatched the phone out of Selene's hand. "No! First, nobody would believe us. And if someone came, they might killed. At the very best, they'd think we were pranking Security and we'd all get kicked out of school! Whose bright idea was it to summon Bloody Mary to begin with?"

"Don't say her name!" Selene begged. "If you keep saying it, she'll come!"

"She's already here," Wanda said. "Alex, any ideas?"

"Well, we can't stay inside here forever," he said. "Maybe we should risk running to the end of the hall and risk running down the fire stairs."

"If she can't come in, let's stay here!" Selene said.

"Maybe we can kill it," Becca said.

"How do you kill a ghost?" Wanda asked.

"Mirror demon," Alex corrected, still glued to the door, eye to the peephole lens.

"What?" Becca asked.

"My uncle. I called him. He said it might be a mirror demon."

"Your uncle is an expert at demons?" Wanda asked.

"He's studied paranormal beliefs and stuff," Alex said defensively. "He has like three or four PhD's."

"Is he a teacher here?" Selene asked hopefully.

"No, he's the curator of a science museum in Oregon now," Alex said. "She's lurking. I can see her—she's on her feet again, but she's not coming close to the door. The salt, I guess."

"How do you kill it?" Becca asked him.

"He said if she touches the person who called her to the mirror, they'll both die," Alex said. "That wouldn't work."

Selene sat on the floor as if she'd been struck on the head. "What? What?" She started to cry, her hand covering her mouth and chin.

"We won't be doing that!" Wanda said. "For that matter, she might go for me—she tried to drag me out of the mirror when we changed places. Does it work if—"

"If you're both on the same side of the mirror, I think it does," Alex said. "And maybe if she touches anybody at all. I don't know. There's probably some lore about it, but I've never read it."

"The mirror!" Wanda said, pointing. A framed mirror hung over one of the desks. Its surface flickered, darkening and lightening again. "I think she's trying to come through!"

Alex yanked the mirror off the wall and put it face-down on the floor. "I think this is too small for that," he said. It was only about a foot square. "But she might come through it as liquid and then shape up again."

"That's my makeup mirror," Selene said.

"Wanda, is she in the hall?"

Wanda checked the peephole. "Don't see her, but can't see too far away from the door."

"Get me a towel," Alex said. "Dark one if you have one."

Selene found a burgundy towel, and he wrapped the mirror in it. "Crack the door and look out," he told Wanda. "If she's not outside, let's run for the stairs."

"It's clear," Wanda reported.

"Let's go—Wanda, you first, then Selene and Becca, and I'll bring up the rear. If she shows up, don't let her touch you!"

They hustled, but before they'd come halfway to the stairs an ear-splitting shriek split the air. They stopped.

Though no one else was on the floor, they heard scrabbling, scratchy sounds coming from half a dozen closed dorm rooms. Then streams of darkness flowed out, behind and in front of them, coalescing, surging to form disjointed body parts—a horrible face and head, eyes glaring as it oozed forward, and across the hall, an arm reaching up from the floor, clawed hand stretching out.

Only one door didn't have a puddle seeping under it, and Wanda hit it with her shoulder. "In here!"

Alex followed the girls in.

"Seriously?" he asked. "This is like the third time I've been in a girls' room today!"

"Oh, shit," Wanda said. One wall was full of mirrors.

Which started to flicker.

* * *

Bloody Mary's mind was less like a human's and more like—well, like a swarm of bees. The bits of her had a certain autonomy. Head and arms might be disconnected, but they could all move, and like a swarm returning to its hive, they could rejoin. The salt had burned her, enraged her, but had not weakened her.

"Soap, soap!" Alex said, laying the wrapped mirror down on a sink. He dashed into the shower and found a sliver of white soap in one of the dishes. _Huh. The toilets are all in their own enclosures, but the girls shower together._ When he had time later, he'd probably picture that scene in his mind—hey, he was a guy who'd never even got past first base with a girl, but he had his ambitions—but at the moment he felt only a vague twitch of annoyance. They toilets and urinals in the guys' dorm were all exposed to view. Which was a problem if you were shy about even peeing in front of other guys—

He went to the mirror closest to the door and soaped a cross on it. He was, technically Jewish—but he'd never even had a bar mitzvah, he'd never learned Hebrew, and his family had yet to visit a temple, but he'd seen his share of vampire movies, so he had a good idea about the proportions, long vertical bar, shorter crossbar about a quarter down from the top.

There were six mirrors, and he soaped five of them, leaving the one farthest from the door unmarked.

"What are you doing?" Wanda asked.

"Trying something that might work," he said. "Look, everybody get into a stall, all right? I'm going to try to lure her in."

"Are you crazy?" Becca asked.

"I'm going to try to send her back into the mirror," Alex said. "And then seal it."

The bathroom door creaked.

"Hurry!" Alex said in a harsh whisper.

Two of the girls did. "Stand on the toilets!" Alex said. "Don't let your feet show!" To Wanda, he said, "You'd better go, too!"

"I'm staying," she said firmly.

"OK, she's pushing on the door. Here's what I want us to do." He hastily filled Wanda in on the plan.

"You sure about this?"

"Not sure about anything. Got any salt left?"

She felt in her pocket. "One."

"Have it handy in case this doesn't work!"

Wanda retreated into the last stall.

Alex stared down the row of sinks. The door was slowly, slowly opening, an inch at a time. He saw something that looked at first like an enormous black spider—no, not a spider's legs, but long, bony fingers with too many joints in them.

The fluorescent lights began to flicker, as though on the verge of dying. _Oh, great. She's gonna come at me in the dark!_

The creature shrieked again, the sound echoing in the shower enclosure, to the right as you came in the door. Then she stood swaying, misshapen—the salt?—and looking more inhuman than ever, arms too skinny and long, insect-like, neck too bony and the head too much like an elongated egg slashed with a spit-glistening mouth. The holes were gone, filled in mostly, though they still showed as pits in the dark gray flesh.

And the eyes, the eyes—human eyes didn't glare, didn't glow, like that.

The lights glimmered.

_Stay on, stay on, don't go out, stay on, please._

Bloody Mary took a step forward, her skeletal feet more like huge bird talons than anything human. Her hands clenched and unclenched as she walked, loose-jointed, as though she were held together by pins loose in their sockets. He heard her hiss.

The overhead lights dimmed to a constant flicker. Alex backed away from her, flattening his back against the wall, the mirror and sink to his right, the toilet stalls to his left.

Feeling idiotic, he held up a bar of soap. "I'm not afraid to use this!" he said.

She gurgled in her throat. Was she laughing at him?

Alex wasn't much of a ball player, but he threw the small bar of soap at her. She dodged it easily and then lunged forward—

" _Now!"_ Alex shouted.

Wanda kicked the stall door open and stepped out. Bloody Mary's head whipped around toward her.

"Hey, look at this, bitch!" Wanda said. She held up the makeup mirror from Selene's room.

Bloody Mary threw up her arms, wrists crossed as though shielding her eyes, and turned away—

Toward the large mirror on the wall.

"Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary! Bloody Mary!" Wanda yelled, her voice echoing.

As if drawn by a magnet, hissing, drooling, Bloody Mary turned back toward the mirror that Wanda held. She had to look. She had to.

And she saw . . . .

The mirror behind her, on the wall, reflected in the one the girl held—and the one the girl held reflected in the one behind her, vanishing into infinity.

"No!" she shrieked, throwing herself toward Wanda—

"It's working!" Alex said. He sidestepped and helped Wanda hold onto the mirror.

"Girls, run!" Wanda shouted. "Down to the lobby! Wait for us there!"

Stalls banged open, and the two girls pounded out the door.

"Hold on," Alex said, one hand hanging onto the mirror, the other arm around Wanda's waist.

Like a swarm of bees. Like a black swarm of bees the shape of a woman. Like a swarm caught between two powerful vacuums—

Bloody Mary came to pieces, one stream of fragments pouring into the wall mirror, another into the mirror Alex and Wanda held—

Skin, hair, flesh, bones, crumbling to pieces, the pieces streaming away to the sound of a ferocious, frightened scream—

Then silence and the lights came up full and Alex realized he had not even noticed how dim they had become—

He heard a sharp snap.

The mirror he and Wanda held had cracked from side to side. It corroded instantly.

And as though in response, the one on the wall turned black and splotched, as if it could barely contain the loathsomeness it had swallowed—

"Damn," Wanda whispered. "I think you did it."

"We did it," he corrected, starting to shiver.

"You scared _now_?" she asked.

"Um—nah, Mary Poppins. 'S just that I nevah 'ad me arm aroun' a loverly lady before an' in a ladies' room, an' all that, eh wot?"

"Oh, shut up," she said.

But a moment later, she kissed him. On the lips.

* * *

In the next few days—

Selene agreed to keep up with her counseling sessions. "I'm going to need them," she admitted. For one thing, in the future, she'd occasionally need to look in a mirror, which at the moment she couldn't stand to do.

Becca, like Prospero in _The Tempest,_ decided she'd had it with rough magic and planned to break her staff and bury her magic books fathoms deep, metaphorically, or at least not to fool around with summoning visions and demons ever again.

And Alex and Wanda—well.

"You're still too young for me," she told him the next afternoon as they sat in the last warm sunshine of autumn on a bench in front of the library. Even so, they could sense a kind of chill behind the warmth. Autumn was ripening toward winter. November would come before they knew it, with chilly nights and mornings and cold rains and worries about term papers and final exams—

"Just two years difference," Alex said. "We make a pretty good team, and I didn't get my one dance."

"Give it up," she said, but not harshly. "Anyhow, thanks for your help. I guess I have to dance with you at least once for that."

"Not if you don't want to," he said. "I didn't do it to make you feel guilty or, you know, obligated. I did it because I never met a girl like you."

She grinned. "A mean bitch?"

Looking into her eyes, he said, "No, somebody who's brave and who takes care of other people before she worries about herself."

She couldn't hold his gaze and looked away, flustered. "Stop it."

"Just telling it like it is," he said. He sighed. "OK. If you insist, but crazy as it sounds, I enjoyed helping you out. I really like you."

After some moments of silence, she spoke again: "There'll be a Thanksgiving dance, you know."

Alex's heart thumped. "Would you?"

"I think," she said, "I'd like that. We'll go on a date. But no promises, OK? Nothing about anything more than going to that one dance."

"Could we just agree to leave it open?" he asked.

She looked at him, smiling, for several long moments. "I think," she said softly, "I think that yeah, I can live with that. Yes. We'll leave it open. For now."

"For now," he said, though already he was hoping for more.

And Bloody Mary? Well, all they knew for sure was that she never came back to any mirror in the dorm. The maintenance people couldn't understand how just one mirror in that one bathroom became so corroded so soon. They'd replace it . . . of course, the expense meant replacing the carpet in the conference room on the first floor would have to wait.

Anyway, Bloody Mary seemed to be gone. Maybe when the mirrors tore her apart, they annihilated her. Maybe she still lurks in the dark mirror realm. Who knows?

Just . . . don't fool around OK? Don't look into a mirror and call Bloody Mary's name. And if she calls _you_ —

Don't answer.

* * *

_The End_


End file.
